Oliver links to this Talk Left post discussing this article:
The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will take away their children’s privacy.
The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory. Similar devices have recently been used to monitor youngsters in some parts of Japan…
The system was imposed, without parental input, by the school as a way to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. Principal Earnie Graham hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID’s so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books…
Each student is required to wear identification cards around their necks with their picture, name and grade and a wireless transmitter that beams their ID number to a teacher’s handheld computer when the child passes under an antenna posted above a classroom door.
Graham also asked to have a chip reader installed in locker room bathrooms to reduce vandalism, although that reader is not functional yet. And while he has ordered everyone on campus to wear the badges, he said only the 7th and 8th grade classrooms are being monitored thus far…
I don’t understand what’s the problem with tracking where minor children are? There’s a lotta sickos out there, why not know where kids are? Do 5th and 7th graders need privacy to such an insane degree? Next thing you’ll be saying parents can’t search their kids’ rooms for drugs.
In the annals of bad ideas, this rates right up near the top, and I think the problem is quite evident- It is WHO is doing the monitoring, and it is what the children will learn form this type of behavior.
The school has decided to undertake this little Orwellian tagging system for its own uses, without the input of the family or the child. It would be another situation altogether if the parents were given the opportunity to opt out, although I would still be rabidly against the system. However, this particular school system is now in the position of forcing children to attend their school, and then to be forced to have their right to privacy infringed upon by an authoritarian system.
While this system is onerous and odious enough, the potential abuses are widespread. Let’s even put aside the presumption that children, young adults, deserve the right to be able to go to the bathroom without being monitored. How long will it be before widescale and even more invasive monitoring of the children begins. Two scenarios:
A.) The Principle suspects an individual student may be involved in some sort of criminal activity- let’s say selling pot. Searches of the student and his/her locker turn up nothing. How long will it be before the principle is monitoring the child, tkaing notes who the child associates with and when. How long before the principle is monitoring a group of students. How long before the id/tracking bracelet is no longer a means of protecting the child, but an intrusive device for pernicious investigations that would outrage any adult? How long before the harassment begins?
B.) A student is doing poorly in school. His/her parents ask the principle to monitor the student’s behavior. The principle then observes the student spends little time in the library, opting to spend free time during the school day in the gym, socializing in the cafeteria, etc. The Principole reports this back to the parents, and/or interrogates the student himself/herself.
These are no wild eyed hypotheticals, and if you are honest with yourself, you will probably admit that the authorities have probably already thought of the first scenario. If traffic light camerass upset you off, this should give you a stroke.
There are a myriad opf reasons in the paragraphs above not to use this technology, but even more important than those are the awful messages that the utilization of this technology sends to children. And really, while 7th and 8th graders are legally children, they are, in large part, young adults, and should be treated as such. We already are pushing these young adults into permanent stages of arrested development with our overbearing rules in schools, our zero tolerance policies, but this takes things to a new level.
If we continue to treat children as possessions, if we continue to instill values that our antithetical to freedom and our cherished expectations of privacy, we are creating the monster that will lead to the end of our freedoms and our liberties as we know them. This is not hysterical fear-mongering on our part- children and young adults when they mature, will engage in the behaviors they have been taught during their formidable years. This is not speculation, this is fact- this is why we spend so much effort trying to instill morals and values in our children. This is why we spend a great amount of energy and money every year trying to teach respect for individuals. This is why we spend a great deal of classtime every year teaching civics and history and American government. We must be careful to teach the right values, in and out of the classroom.
Recently, civil libertarians were rightly and justifiably up in arms with a national survey commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation which reported the following chilling tidbits of information:
– Nearly three-fourths of high school students either do not know how they feel about the First Amendment or admit they take it for granted.
– Seventy-five percent erroneously think flag burning is illegal.
– Half believe the government can censor the Internet.
– More than a third think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.
As Knight Foundation President and CEO Hodding Carter III noted,