Spicy! Ow. Ow ow ow. If you heard a pained roar earlier today it was thousands of Deans of Adult Continuing Education crying out in anguish.
I have already used up >50% of my life expectancy so I’d better take the hint and wrap things up here so I can focus on enjoying what few years I have left!
(Wink. I get what you’re saying, although not all of the conclusions you reach, but I’m trying!)
First, take heart! Have you seen how many younger people out there have been, like, making artisanal soaps over the past decade? I’m quite sure that in the late 90s, rec.arts.soap-making was full of “holy cow, where are we going to find the next generation of soapmakers?! Kids these days are too obsessed with Tamagotchi to appreciate the finer points of making soap or even buying a really good handcrafted soap. It’s pretty clear that this is a dying community, you guys” posts and then fast-forward a dozen years and suddenly there were artisanal soaps everywhere. You never can tell when something’s going to come back into fashion with the youth!
But, okay, you don’t want to sit passively by and hope for the kind of lightning strike that hit the soap world. Trouble is, there’s not a singular standard for what is and is not “acceptable in a classroom” and what keeps our active and semi-retired teacher pals from being sanctioned. School District A might sanction a teacher for exposing students to something that district’s board considers sacrilegious, for example. District B might sanction a teacher for different material that District A would consider perfectly reverent because District B is publicly funded and its board would rather avoid overtly religious content.
(No, this is not a straw-man argument, and I reject the need to prove the existence of the slippery slope in this matter when
“I think the onus is on the mods/curators to make the default page as safe as possible, to cover as many bases as possible.”
has entered the conversation. The call for scope creep is coming from inside the house!)
You need to scrub way more than SSA and friends from the home page if you want to protect every instructor of youth worldwide. (I get it that some people here are saying “Yeah, so?”)
Kids-Dot (if I may call it that, we keep making links that don’t go anywhere right now when we talk about this concept) sounds keen, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy Team Never’s requirements, because they don’t want a naïve visitor to ever see Badness, and a naïve visitor is much more likely to arrive at IFDB Prime (#2 Google hit for “interactive fiction” right here right now!) than Kids-Dot.