CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Internet filters may help protect parents from their fears, and schools from lawsuits, but they're "highly imperfect" tools for protecting children, says Nicholas Burbules.

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Burbules, the Grayce Wicall Gauthier professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is worried that parents and teachers who believe filters block all harmful material -- when none come close to doing that -- may pay less attention to what kids are actually doing online.

"They create a false sense of security and, ironically, could actually exacerbate the problem," Burbules said.

Also, what most filters define as harmful is often very subjective, he said. Pornography and sexual content gets a lot of attention, but it's only a small piece of what can be found that can be perceived as harmful, including advertising targeted at children.

"The average kid is much more likely to be exploited by a commercial company than by an online predator, but we worry incessantly about one and don't even think about the other," said Bubules

Burbules is not in favor of trying to make better Web filters, but rather of not using them at all. He and Thomas Callister Jr., chair of the department of education at Whitman College, make their case in a new paper, "Just Give It To Me Straight: A Case Against Filtering the Internet" which is available at Burbule's Web site.

Burbules and Callister, both former teachers as well as fathers of young children, have spent years studying the educational ramifications of information technology. Among their collaborations was the book "Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies in Education."

Web filters not only create a false sense of security, they encourage censorship, Burbules said. Since filter-makers are faulted more for what gets through, not what is blocked by mistake, "they're always going to err on the side of excluding too much rather than too little," he said. The censorship is even more troubling because filter-makers won't reveal how their filters decide what to block and why.

Despite their flaws, filters may make some sense for young children, Burbules said. "But the older a child is, the less likely filters are to work -- kids learn how to get around them -- and the more important it becomes to acknowledge and engage their curiosity, rather than simply to block it."

While the Internet holds some dangers, Burbules said, "learning to inhabit and navigate this space, safely, is one of the most important things that schools need to teach young people today."