An Interesting read, and No I don't work in the Education Sector, I have at times in my Career been in charge of our IT Department sin Missions or in my role here providing guidance on our policies regarding Firewalls and content Filtering, and its always debated by IT managers and users what should or should not be restricted and ther eis never a happy balance for sure.

As for blocking things because a student is looking at it and distracted from his class work, I have had similar requests so that Staff wont be able to do so much on the internet and hence work more, and I took the same approach, thats a people management problem not a tech problem