I agree with everybody’s argument that we should live in a free society, without a censorship media. However, I believe that this is impossible in our world. We do not have censors like the ones we had on dictatorship times. On the other hand, we cannot forget the principal censor: money. Our media is, if not totally, at least majorly biased. Who makes the choices? Who decides what should go on air and what should not? Who writes the news on the coverage of magazines? Someone is making the call, of course. The great part of the population does not even think about these issues, but we are already living in a system that follows this censorship media. And I think that the big question here is: what can we do to avoid believing blindness in major publications that are not worried about readers and viewers.

Learning a language that will make it possible for deaf people be part of society as equals can only bring good results for everybody. For the death community, the improvements are great: better job opportunities, easy way to attend college, the possibility of feeling as a real part of society.

For the society as a whole, we can also point out lots of improvements: learning how to deal with people that have limitations (we never know what the future holds and if we will be dealing with limitations too), discovering ways of decreasing prejudices and enjoying the pleasure of someone’s company that we thought it was impossible.

I believe that Libras should be taught in schools. Not only in fundamental schools, but also in high schools and universities until everybody knows it. This seems like a utopia, or impossible dream. But in fact, the only thing missing in Brazil’s educational system here is hard work.

I agree with Paula when she says that it is very difficult to generalize this topic. I work with teenagers and I know that are different cases of dependence. There are those extreme cases of young people that cannot be one minute without checking their iphones. But there are also many teenagers that practice a lot of sports, that like to hang out with friends and use technology in a healthier way.

And I always observe many adults using their cell phones all the time. This dependence, this addiction to new technologies is not only related to their ages. We can find really young teens that rather play soccer than play video games and many adults that live connected all the time.

So I guess that dependence on technology should be something discussed all the time, through different kinds of media, including the internet. We want to use technology and all of its wonders. Yet, it is extremely important to keep focus on “real” life.

I agree with Marina. When we think about the Brazilian Educational System, the first thing that comes to our minds is the abyss that separates those who can pay and those who cannot pay for private schools. Since millions of people do not even have access to a good education during fundamental and high schools, how is it going to be possible for these people to get into a public University?

Of course that these quotas will not solve the problem. First, because many students may not be able to finish the college, since they do not have a basic and very important education. Second, because giving the opportunity to just a few is really far away of improving education.

But considering these and many other problems, we must realize that at least this is a first step towards a better educational system, with a larger number of students having real possibilities to change their lives.

This improvement process will be long, will take a lot of time and effort. Changing the way things are now in our schools will certainly not be an easy thing to do. However, it is important to start somewhere.

This is something that I have not considered yet. It is really difficult to define ourselves and our believes outside the social group that we belong. That is why we could reinforce the idea that plagiarism must be part of classroom discussions. Only talking about it and thinking together we can change the way that we deal with this intelectual thefts.

I believe that plagiarism is only becoming such a serious problem in academic papers because it is not being dealt with properly when students are still in high school. When high school students work on their projects during the school years, teachers should bring the topic of plagiarism to classroom, promote debates and help students understand that copying and pasting someone else’s ideas is not actually developing a serious research.

I agree that plagiarism can be considered a theft, but I think that we must help our students to avoid this behavior. Sometimes they can be acting like this not because they are bad-intentioned but because they really do not know how to do an academic paper.