Internet Safety Curriculum Shouldn't Be Scary

NPR recently ran a story about Virginia's high schools, where all students will be required to have some form of Internet safety training. The Virginia State Assembly passed the legislation in 2006. The Office of the State Attorney General has made i-safety a priority.

Virginia, in particular the State Attorney General's office, gets a big thumbs up for recognizing that it's high time we educated kids about the tools they're going to be using to shape their world.

But I'm giving them a thumbs down for focusing on scare tactics to educate. Here's a snippet of the talk that Gene Fishel, an assistant Virginia attorney general, delivered to a Virginia high school. "MySpace is a breeding ground for these sexual predators and there are all sorts of cases happening now where predators have tracked down their victims off MySpace. And they abduct them, they will rape them, and do all sorts of things."

The news report goes on to give Fishel's advice: Don't talk to strangers, don't share personal information, and don't agree to meet people who approach you on the web.

The advice is impractical and often ignored. I can see the kids' eyeballs rolling as they hear the high tech equivalent of the "don't talk to strangers" speech. By the time they're in high school, kids, like adults, are defined by their personal information. We work for a company or graduated from a college that defines much of our relationship to the world. They go to school or have plans to go to college somewhere—their identifying marks.

Kids are not going to stop telling people they encounter on the web where they're from and what they do. It's the nature of social interactions.

What they should be learning is how the Internet works and how to choose carefully about how they share their information. They should be learning the mechanics of social networking in school. How can someone who doesn't know you infiltrate your profile? (Hint: It's usually through a careless friend in one of your social networking groups.) What's the best way to set up the privacy settings on sites like MySpace and Facebook? How does the database technology that underlies social networks make it easy to target unsuspecting kids?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't warn kids about the dangers of cyberspace. Just don't make scaring them the central part of the curriculum. Don't dispense impractical advice about encountering strangers on the web. Kudos to Virginia for recognizing a need and supplying some solid "do nots" about the Internet. But let's try to temper the "fear" talk with some realistic, informed action plans.

What do you think? What should schools be teaching about Internet safety?