Safety of the Self-contained classroom

Konrad Glogowski describes a kind of learning that is interest based, where students learn from and with people who share the same passion. He uses the phrase "cocooning in protected classrooms." It made me think of several different things.
We have a constant debate in our division about whether to block and control the websites available in schools. It seems to bring out strong opinions. I do think the debate comes from two different origins. One is that often it is the techie support people who argue for blocking, both for security reasons, but also because they are not into thinking about student capacity and thinking int he same way teachers do. Another reason I think there are different points of view is that this judgement call would be strongly influenced by a deep philosophical belief of how we run our classroom and what we believe about the student teacher relationship. Are teachers and students co-learners, facilitator and learner, teacher as information giver, etc.? How much we want to allow students to explore the world depends on what we believe.