I recall one head of an education technology department in a government agency telling me that at his son’s school the technicians changed the internet filtering password every day to prevent kids looking at stuff they shouldn’t. His son had usually cracked the password by the start of the morning break and shared it with all his mates.
As it happens, there was a 15 year-old boy in one of my computer programming classes, in a school in which I was a teacher, head of department, IT co-ordinator and network manager (the school certainly got value for money) who was incredibly skillful at breaking through every single firewall I set up to stop him hacking into it. After a couple of weeks of this cat and mouse malarkey I decided to enlist him as my network assistant. I proposed to him that his role would be to monitor the network and close any security holes he identified, and to make sure nobody managed to hack into it. He accepted the offer: problem solved.
I overheard a great conversation yesterday. Two girls were chatting behind me in the queue in the Post Office. From their discussion about school options and examinations, I’d say they were around 14 and 15 years old. Here’s part of the conversation, it really made me smile.
Girl #1: My mum doesn’t even know I’m on Facebook.
Girl #2: Oh gosh, you’re on Facebook too? So am I. My parents don’t know either; my mum doesn’t like the idea of me being on it.
Girl #1: I have to wait till my mum’s gone out shopping to use the computer. She hasn’t realised that I know the password. I cracked it six months ago.
Girl #2: It’s passworded?
Girl #1: Yeah, my dad put a password on it. It took me a while to work out what it was, but it wasn’t that hard: his name and date of birth.
Now, I’m probably wrong for thinking like this, but I find it very uplifting to be reminded that youngsters of today are just as rebellious as kids have always been. Also, it made me chuckle to think of these parents, blithely going about their business, secure in the (false) knowledge that they are several steps ahead of their kids.
There’s hope for us all yet!