DragonBlog

“Our children have been wrapped in cellophane by well-meaning adults, they have been carefully and overzealously protected from the unpleasant. Now they can no longer be.”
–Alice Dagliesh, author.

Good, thoughtful teachers have many questions about the way education is being delivered in our public and private schools, which is, after all, how I came to start The Dragon Academy as an experiment in learning otherwise. So I have grown used to being contacted once or twice a week by a colleague who is curious about my programme, or wishes to visit, or is hoping for a job. It was when the fourth c.v. listed Leo Baeck as current employer, that the penny dropped. “What is it about Leo Baeck?” I asked her. “Where have you been?” she answered.

If you, like me, were distracted by the foofarah over the Facebook study group at Ryerson, here is the Leo Baeck story in a nutshell. The Board of Leo Baeck (a Reform Jewish day school for some 800 students from junior kindergarten through grade eight) imported David Prashker from Britain to be the Director of the school because of his administrative chops. He was also a poet and writer, and it turns out had a website of his own, on which he published some explicit, violent and sexist “poetry” (which, as a person of some literary discrimination, I must note was God-awful, narcissistic and imitative). In due course, someone sent a mass email to all the parents of the students at Leo Baeck, pointing this out. A hue and cry, Mr. Prashker resigned, and the Chair of the Board expressed, rather bafflingly, his dismay that the privacy of the parent email list had been breached. I can only presume he is the single person in the country who does not receive junk mail.

The champions of artistic freedom and those who draw a sharp distinction between public and private actions argue that what Mr. Prashker writes or posts on his own time is irrelevant to his public role. The defenders of childhood innocence and the protectors of public decency argue that what Mr. Prashker writes and posts is in the public domain, and that he has therefore assumed a second public role which is incompatible with his day job.

This is a big issue. Schools at all levels from elementary through graduate, and libraries, not to mention most wired workplaces, are struggling to control the things that swim like lampreys down the broad conduit of the internet. Firewalls are crude, and predators subtle. Our children have ready access to the very things from which we would like to protect them, for which they are unprepared. And meanwhile, the case of the unfortunate Mr. Prashker illustrates another danger. We are in a new world where the public and the private are confused, where impulsive postings have a lingering afterlife in cyberspace, and boundaries can be breached by clever eight year olds. Password protection frustrates the rule-following and forgetful middle-aged, but is a joke to the criminal and the child equally. Nothing is safe, nothing restricted. And yet cyberspace feels curiously intimate. Like someone talking to a stranger on a train, the blogger becomes dis-inhibited, and the unguarded foolishness that might have stayed locked up in a diary (and even those are dangerous, as Philip Roth knows) is there for the world to see, and stays there long after the writer has forgotten it or even imagined it deleted. Because, apparently, nothing is deleted.

And here is the role for education. We need to construct new rules for conduct, new definitions, new boundaries. We have to carve out a private space in the world wide web. We need to make ourselves and our children aware of the potential both for freedom of expression and the repercussions it may have if we are not wise. It used to be very clear what was the public space, because it was physical. It contained what others could see, hear, find. The private space was behind closed doors. To breach the private was to bring it out into the public sphere (newspaper coverage, photographs, physical reality). But now you can feel private, behind closed doors, alone in the darkness broken only by the eerie glow of your computer screen. And yet be literally broadcasting on the world-wide web, presenting yourself to strangers in your most intimate manner. The best way to learn is through experience. Let us learn through Mr. Prashker’s experience. Does anyone even make cellophane anymore?