Back in the day, when the internet was “the web,” or “the net,” when it was brand-shiny new, it was often enthusiastically referred to as “the information superhighway.” Zoom-zoom.
And for a long time it actually lived up to that billing. Once you grasped the Boolean logic behind search engines, if your quarry was out there in cyberspace, you could track it down fairly quickly. Unfortunately those heady days are long gone.
 
Part of the difficulty now is simply the mind-blowing amount of information that’s available. But the larger – and much more insidious – reason that you can’t always seem to find what you’re looking for, is the deliberate filtering of certain subjects and sites.
 
There’s been growing evidence that search engines, Google in particular, blocks conservative websites. Or they at least position them so far down into a particular search (you need to click through to page 5 or 6 at least) that users just get frustrated and stop looking. (Maybe we’re each trapped inside our own filter bubble…?!)
 
This is particularly nefarious when it’s a topic like say – global warming. Rather than being able to fairly research both sides of the contentious issue, the first several pages of links all seem to direct you to climate alarmists. As if there were no other legitimate position on the subject.
 
Recently there’s been a really disturbing report about at least one public high school (in Connecticut) restricting internet access. Oh, they’re not blocking things like porn, violence or profanity. No, it’s Faith, Family and Freedom Websites.
 
 
The story involves student Andrew Lampart, who was attempting to do research for an upcoming school debate ~

After being blocked from websites supporting Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms as stated in the Second Amendment, Andrew soon learned his school’s computers prohibited him from viewing any website or information that wasn’t liberal in nature.
 
National Rifle Association website — blocked. The Republican Party website — blocked. National Right to Life website — blocked. Pro-traditional marriage websites — blocked. Vatican website — blocked. 😯
 
But here’s what wasn’t blocked in his continued Internet search: pro-gun-control websites, the Democratic Party website, the Planned Parenthood website, an LGBT website and an Islamic website.

Chuck Norris discusses the implications of this blatant censorship in an article today at TownHall ~

A high school’s prohibiting conservative views isn’t shocking to any of us who for decades have watched the dilapidating state of public education. It’s just one more sign that public schools are little more than secular progressive indoctrination camps.
 
Andrew was exactly right when he said about his Internet education experience — or lack thereof: “This is really borderline indoctrination. Schools are supposed to be fair and balanced towards all ways of thinking. It’s supposed to encourage students to formulate their own opinions. Students aren’t able to do that here at the school, because they are only being fed one side of the issue” […]
 
Roughly 30 years ago, Dr. Allan Bloom wrote these words of warning about a country and educational system that were mimicking fascism more than they were freedom, in his now classic book “The Closing of the American Mind”: “True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.”
 
There is also no doubt about this: When we fear alternative views to the extent that we eliminate them from curricula, we have reduced education to nothing more than tyranny and indoctrination.

And if the progressives have their way the “the information superhighway” will just become one endless loop of leftist propaganda.