Science & Tech Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

Spoken like a policymaker trying to sound pragmatic while pointing at a shapeless menace. Fitzpatrick’s “these people” does a lot of quiet work: it conjures predators, scammers, radicals, bullies, pornographers - whoever the listener already fears - without naming any group that could trigger a factual debate or a civil-liberties backlash. The vagueness is strategic. It lets the speaker borrow urgency from worst-case scenarios while keeping the solution safely administrative.

The proposed “best defense” lands on two familiar levers of American governance: education (a virtue word that signals responsibility) and restriction (a concrete action that reads as protection). Pairing them is the rhetorical sweet spot. Education alone can look like hand-wringing; blocking alone can look like censorship. Together, they sell as balanced, common-sense “guardrails,” especially to parents exhausted by how quickly digital culture outpaces their supervision.

The context is the long, post-2000s drumbeat of online moral panic colliding with the institutional reality of schools: limited time, limited staff, and a desire to minimize liability. “During the school day” is the key narrowing clause. It frames the Internet not as a public square with rights attached, but as a school resource, like a library or a lab, where access is conditional and managed. The subtext is less about empowering kids than about controlling environments - and signaling that adults are still in charge of a medium that often makes them feel obsolete.