Forgive me, Father, for I have blogged

Several Catholic high schools have banned students from blogging about themselves and their schools.

Some other bloggers out there think it’s a bad reason because it intrudes on freedom of speech, etc. Others think it’s good because it prevents cyber bullying.

I think it’s a good idea for a different reason: The individual student’s psychological wellbeing. Lets face it, being a teen and a student is tough. Having a blog usually involves revealing some of your innermost thoughts and feelings. I remember reading recently - sorry, I can’t remember where - that there can be a lot of psychological guilt for posting your deepest darkest secrets to a blog and then finding yourself regretting it years later.

As adults, we understand this risk and probably tone it down a bit. Considering many (most?) students have somewhat of a distorted view of the future, these posts can become “dark chapters” of their lives they’d rather forget.

Let me give you an example. You have a depressed, “outcast” teen who blogs all the bad things that are happening, maybe he admits to smoking pot, drinking or stealing something. What happens when that person “blossoms” in college and cleans up his act? Considering Google and the other engines archive the blog posts for who knows how long, this person may have a public record of something that one day prevents him from being hired for a particular job or some other benefit being denied because of their post.

I’ll never forget the day a neighbor typed my former street address into Yahoo so he could retrieve my phone number. He told me that an Internet post from 10 years ago appeared detailing one of my Graduate School papers!

Link: Forgive me, Father, for I have blogged | News.blog | CNET News.com.

Forgive me, Father, for I have blogged

Several Catholic high schools have banned their students from posting personal information about themselves or their schools, according to a report by the Associated Press. The ban, which one school’s principal says has been in effect for five years but is only now being strictly enforced, requires students to cease participating in social networking sites like MySpace.com, where many young people post personal information, photos and blog entries–and it even applies to information students post from their home computers. School officials say the policy was instituted to protect students from online predators.