Recently I began writing an article for the Tiger Print’s December issue on video game releases for 2016. This lead me to the Naughty Dog website, an informational forum for Naughty Dog productions…. and the site was blocked, keyword “naughty.”

That very same day in my sociology class, we began a project on rape culture. Some internet research was required, and a feminist website with information and statistics on gender-based hate crimes was blocked for containing the word “rape.”

Seriously?

What does the school board think, that hiding a feminist website will congruently hide the fact that rape exists from a bunch of high school students? Some of whom HAVE BEEN RAPED?

Statistically, 10.5% of high school girls have reported being victims of rape. Not

statistically, 100% of high school boys have used the word “naughty” in a web search.

Other sites that have recently been exempted from availability on school grounds: Facebook, for “prohibited friendship content,” because now friendship is an inappropriate pursuit for school; any search results on Moby Dick, a piece of classic literature, for containing the keyword “dick;” Spotify, which can literally only be used to play music; Tumblr, DeviantArt, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram – just to name a few.

This new game the board has put into play is similar to the infamous book bannings, and raises the same question.

What’s the point?

We’ll go to that site outside of school anyways; you’re not protecting us from anything. And banning sites like DeviantArt, a database for nothing more or less than a wide variety of works of art, makes little to no sense at all. When did art become an offensive topic, and if it is so awful, why does our school offer an Art History class?

So teachers want us to pay attention in class and not be on our phones all the time. This is understandable. But by making these programs and apps so difficult to use, all we are going to do, as social teenagers who are wirelessly connected to the world, is spend more time trying to get around the system than we would if we could simply send a quick Snapchat and get back to our school work.

This is exactly what I did. As I grew more and more frustrated with my inability to complete research projects on school grounds, I decided to delve deeper and began to look for ways to get around the North Korean-inspired firewall.

Though it may seem like the dumbest system to ever exist, the firewall is actually pretty severely planned out. Even proxy content sites are blocked, which means any indirect means to get into a blocked site through an alternate server is impossible – at least, if you attempt to download such servers on school grounds.

This is a hint to tell you there are in fact very distinct ways to get around the annoying firewall the school has put in place, and that is really the whole point.

You can try to distract us, you can make things more difficult, but in the end, we will do anything to figure out a way to do what we want. As your cockblocking (keyword “cock”) grows in intelligence, so will we.

So the board might as well make it easier on all of us and just relax – at least a little bit – on the controlling filtration that is currently being imposed on students.