The Blockbuster Video Test: Chromebooks Don't Pass

Remember Blockbuster Video?

Think back to the old Blockbuster Video stores. Rows and rows of family appropriate movies to browse — comedies, dramas, cartoons, documentaries. It was, for the most part, a fun and safe place for a kid to wander around to select a movie to enjoy on a Friday night. But, as you may recall, many locations had a strange little room in the back with a door and a low-quality lock or do not enter sign. That was the “adults only” room — 18 and up in my home state — and it housed material that no reasonable school would make accessible to students.

This part is important to the analogy. While that back room existed, there were guardrails in place to prevent kids under 18 from accessing it. There was a clerk behind the counter watching the store. There were other customers milling around who serve as passive witnesses and active deterrents to curious kids. There was a lock on the door, even if it was cheap, or at least a sign warning of entry. By design, safeguards were in place to prevent a minor from entering that room and consuming harmful, exploitative, and other deeply inappropriate content. Was the system perfect? No, but it was functional because of the layers of human oversight -- the presence of adults who would notice and intervene if a kid attempted to circumvent the safeguards inadvertently or otherwise.

Now consider this. Remove the store clerk. Empty the store of other customers. Leave only a 12-year-old (or any elementary or middle school age student) in that Blockbuster with nothing but time and curiosity. How long do you think that flimsy lock holds? Five minutes? Two? Quite frankly, the timing matters less than realization that almost every child will end up in that back room -- not because the child is bad, but because children are curious, impulsive, and developmentally incapable of consistently exercising restraint expected of adults. That is not a moral failing. It is biology. It could also happen inadvertently, when well-intentioned student research in school leads to exposure of inappropriate content.

That empty Blockbuster is a School-Issued Chromebook.

Every time a school asks students to research with a Chromebook, they are leaving the child alone in the Blockbuster – no clerk, no witnesses, and a backroom filled with wildly inappropriate and potentially actionably harmful material secured with, a best, a low-tech software filter that even second graders in this state have circumvented.Behind that back door is not just pornography — though there is plenty of that — but also graphic violence, extremist ideology, discriminatory content, predatory chatrooms, and AI systems that will generate literally anything a child asks for without hesitation, judgment, or ethics. After all, AI systems suggest prompts and generate content the school cannot control.

Filters and other controls on Chromebooks are a gesture, not a solution. And unlike the old Blockbuster, there is no one who can stop exposure to harmful content until it is too late. Think about it. Even a teacher in the same classroom as twenty students behind Chromebooks cannot monitor twenty screens simultaneously. While researching on a Chromebook, the student is alone in the video store.

We agree on the principle but pretend it does not exist online.

Here is what perplexes me. No reasonable parent, no school board member, no superintendent would advocate for maintain illicit material in a school library — not even if it were locked away in a back room. Everyone agrees a school library should be curated to include only age-appropriate materials. In fact, parents expect that every book on those shelves has been vetted and purposefully selected by professionals who are required to take that responsibility seriously. If a librarian put a collection of explicit material in the elementary school library behind lock and key with a “Do Not Enter Ever” sign, that person would be fired and may even face legal charges depending on the content. The mere presence of illicit material in a space designed for children would be a failure of adult judgment, to put it mildly.

Why abandon that reasoning when content is presented not in paper but pixels? The internet is not a curated library. It is every library, every locked room, every back-alley, every political and religious view, and every strange and dark corner of human expression — all accessible to students with a few keystrokes. The internet and generative AI tools do not have the judgment or legal obligations of a librarian. They are untethered to morality. There are no effective guardrails in place with those boundless digital libraries.

If you do not agree with housing inappropriate material in your school library, then you should not agree with replacing books with Chromebooks, which provide a gateway from student to inappropriate material. The Blockbuster back room does not change just because you moved it onto a screen, but it increases the likelihood students will be exposed to in appropriate content.

It is time to apply standards we already hold to reality. Chromebooks are not for education; they are playing with fire and have never been shown to be more effective than traditional pedagogy – paper, pencils, and textbooks. In this time where parents loudly protest certain books or genres in school libraries, it is unimaginable that Chromebooks with the ability to access everything are tolerated.

So here is the test: did you look inside the Blockbuster back room when you were a kid? Your kid will too.