The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Router-manufacturer should be mandated to implement a functionality that allows applying a whitelist filter for certain times of a day. It would have helped me a lot as a parent to make sure that my children can only access Desmos, online Office sites etc. while they are supposed to do their homework.

Or just buy a router that has that. There are tons that do it. Even my shitty CenturyLink DSL router has it.

Apple devices, both iOS and macOS, have great and fairly easy to use remotely-managed parental controls (Microsoft may too, IDK) that can do things like apply all sorts of limits to allowed websites or apps during certain periods of the day, but god-damned school-provided-and-managed devices blow holes through any plan to use that for those purpose. Even if the school sends home devices in your ecosystem, you won't be able to configure the parental controls on them, and their settings are always way too loose.

Which leaves you with your network as the place you have to manage all of that, which is a much bigger pain in the ass.

Unfortunately the internet has been corrupted by JavaScript. A website is rarely loading a single site anymore. Try noscript and you'll quickly see that, even a trivial website loads dozens of dependencies. Dependencies that shift over time.

Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.

Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!

There are plenty of companies successfully doing allow-list only filters. At home for focus: https://gertrude.app/ At work for security: https://adamnet.works/

Sure but here in the UK schools will use what is cheapest, free or part of a wider package of software already used. RM web filtering or smoothwall make me want to bash my skull against a wall at times. Finally School IT staff are not judged on their ability to manage a web filter well. Safeguarding is (rightly) the primary concern and so if an existing solution can be said to block the more egregious parts of the internet, it's irrelevant if it blocks the useful parts too.