A school in Michigan has decided to ban its students from having a MySpace account. Period. End of statement. They can’t access the site from school, and next year, they’ll be signing an agreement that they won’t access the site at home, either.

In this day of children being babysat by the television and the internet, I’m certain students will completely comply with the agreement.

I’m personally horrified by this decision. The school has decided that it has the right to control the students’ lives outside school. While their intention is good, the execution is going to prove much more than the school can handle.

If they really want to protect their students from the evils of MySpace (and the rest of the internet), the answer isn’t banning. It’s teaching. The first step is to teach children how to be safe online. The second is to teach them how to evaluate the people they meet online. (The third is how to evaluate the information they find online, but that’s an entirely different rant.)

When you arm someone with a reason, give them the capability to analyze situations for themselves, it’s amazing how often you can prevent most of what you were trying to block. Children feel less likely to rebel against what they feel are pointless rules, so teaching them gives them the concrete purposes for a rule and helps them understand why the boundary exists at all.

Children can be fairly rational, reasonable creatures when they’re given that opportunity. It’s actually part of how they grow into rational, reasonable adults.

I’m asked that fairly frequently by my students. They figure if overly smart Rebecca doesn’t use the skill they’re working on when she isn’t teaching it to them, that’s grounds for them to not have to learn it.

Usually, I ask them what they plan to study in college. The majority of my students are high schoolers who really haven’t given it much thought, so I win the argument on the fact they’ll need the math class to have fewer classes to take in college (Let’s face it, those remedial classes take up a lot of time.) For those who have decided a major already, it’s a matter of convincing them they need the class to get accepted to college.

Either way, it’s a real fight.

I wish I had a far better answer for my students, but the simple fact of the matter is that knowing an inscribed angle is half the measurement of its corresponding arc probably won’t come up in their normal lives. Upper level math is hard to defend, unlike science and English.

Of course, while my students are learning how to interpret what they read, how the world works, and how to take a differential, they aren’t necessarily learning life skills that already come into play on a daily basis. There’s something wrong with that. If it’s something that will help them succeed in life, it should be incorporated into their schooling somehow. (I feel like a traitor to my content area as I say that. In my defense, I get the necessity of algebra and geometry because they teach necessary reasoning skills, but beyond that is just nice to have completed before the rigors of college.)