> I have increasingly wanted to make sure they have access to older educational content that is not dependent on the will of a publisher and does not constantly connect them with possible cyber-bullying.
My life experience leads me to reject some of the premises of this effort, the path to hell is paved by well meaning people trying to control children’s access to information. My parents did everything in their power to ensure I only consumed content that aligned with fundamentalist religion, young earth creationism, and hyper conservative politics. I wasn’t allowed to learn about dinosaurs because content about them made reference to their existing millions of years ago, not inside the “<6000 years age of the earth”. I wasn’t allowed to read science materials that discussed or even tangentially referenced evolution. I didn’t really know what a gay person was until I was an adult. I wasn’t allowed to watch most popular cartoons and movies because they depicted sex, violence, and other sin. They enforced the ridiculous concept of “bad words”. I am thankful every day that occasional unsupervised Internet access allowed me to broaden my perspective. I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand. I now believe in talking to children about challenging subjects, not preventing them from being exposed to them. My experience made me much more zealous about freedom of information and speech than most.
Cyber bullying is a weak excuse for limiting Internet freedom. I was psychologically tortured in person every day by other kids, made an outcast, and shunned. I was hit/kicked/punched/tackled or threatened with a weapon almost every day for years. I developed something akin to PTSD from constantly watching my back for kids trying to surprise attack me from behind. Internet interactions are incredibly safe environments for learning how to cope with bullies by comparison, like training wheels for dealing with real world bullying you will encounter. Unless you’re associated with something that goes mega viral like Monica Lewinsky or the Star Wars kid making you forever tied to an embarrassment, online bullying will never have even 5% of the impact of what you’ll have done to you in person. We need to worry about the far more damaging things that are done in person with full awareness of teachers/administrators who are sometimes even complicit. Kids can’t even feel physically safe in schools and we’re responding by limiting their access to the Internet. Even more access to the Internet might have allowed me to realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, it’s almost universally experienced by ADHD and autistic kids, and it gets much better when you get past school.