This final thought from Seth Godin’s post today got stuck in my head.

We shouldn’t be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don’t.

Of course, that’s not true of kids.

We seem to be very surprised when they publish to the web, especially material we deem to be inappropriate (a judgement call), which seems rather silly since we do very little to help them understand how to post appropriately.

Maybe it’s different in your school district, but around here we work very hard to make sure students don’t publish anything during school and overreact when we discover they’ve done it elsewhere.

Of course, many in our system will tell you that we do provide the tools for students to learn these skills. They come in the form of various “walled gardens”, resources which kids understand are artificial and far underpowered compared those they have available in their real world.