>>> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications. >This is absolutely not true.Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad.

And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

> Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

There's so much wrong here.

A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.

B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.

D) big tech will tell you "this is age appropriate" and the only thing that means is that you probably won't see porn. Anything else, including gambling ads on youtube, you do see.

You see, you're trying to discuss the specifics which in this case is a losing approach if your goal is to protect your chidlren from being victimized by the attention economy. The reason is that those benefiting from the attention economy have more lawyers and more engineers to deploy than any individual parent.

The schools could also simply not distribute tablets or laptops to students. The technology has not produced noticeably better readers, thinkers, or writers compared to the days when students read actual books and wrote on paper.