Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/dec/02/school-surveillance-us-schools-safety-shootings

by bookofjoe • 7 years ago

375 426 7 years ago

t34543• 7 years ago

This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.

Of course they think that, they’re still kids. Who’s going to protect them from surveillance?

IMO this is way over the top - and it’s conditioning future generations to accept this level of surveillance as adults.

Ididntdothis• 7 years ago

They probably won’t even feel safe without it.

mywittyname• 7 years ago

From what I've heard of students, the surveillance they are under is a constant reminder that they are "not safe". People are just now starting to study what should have always been obvious: that active shooter drills are traumatic to students [1].

These topics are much easier to tackle than the real issues effecting students.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/778015261/experts-worry-activ...

ptero2• 7 years ago

Agreed. And I wonder if the answer would be different if they asked parents instead of kids (who remember having regular, metal knives at school cafeterias; being able to bring a folding knife to school; etc.).

It seems to me that that public acceptance of such surveillance is a side effect of the mainstream media pushing scares and sensationalist coverage (because this is the only thing they have a chance of selling), not some grand evil plan, but not sure.

jancsika• 7 years ago

If only the media were less sensational kids would not be under constant surveillance by the technology that HN posters are helping to develop.

philwelch5• 7 years ago

In some countries like the UK, even adults are discouraged and disallowed from carrying folding knives anywhere. Scenes like this are commonplace: https://twitter.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096

JKCalhoun• 7 years ago

mainstream media pushing scares and sensationalist coverage

It's almost as if fear sells.

When someone's selling fear, only cowards are buying.

JoBrad• 7 years ago

I agree that it is way over-the-top.

Counterpoint to your conditioning point: kids tend to rebel against oversight, and will probably include this in the list of things they reject.

basilgohar2• 7 years ago

I think this is a gross over-exaggeration. While it is not uncommon for kids to rebel against, for example, their parents at a certain and whatnot, I think this is different than saying that the majority of kids will do it.

The public school system functions as a major conditioning environment to get children used to the norms of society, including deference to authority, following rules, and other things that are generally accepted as good. This is the ideal time for those things to happen because of how pliable the young mind still is.

However, we must be very careful how constrained we make such environments and the idea that safety is guaranteed by subjecting kids to what is effectively zero privacy means we've traded, yet again, liberty for security, thus relinquishing the effective right to both.

This will be as effective at rooting out violence in schools as bombing 3rd world villages has been in rooting out terrorism. Until the underlying issues are addressed (mental health, social disparities, racial divides, etc.) the kettle will continue boiling over and more-and-more unpredictable and chaotic ways.

shadowgovt14• 7 years ago

Or they will observe the world doesn't burn down around them with this level of surveillance in place and will come to find it normal.

Which may very well be fine; perhaps it's a useful normal.

entropea2• 7 years ago

and it’s conditioning future generations to accept this level of surveillance as adults.

They will absolutely never be free of surveillance in a modern society, whether private or by government, anyway. Might as well get them used to it. They will always have devices on them that track everything they do. Society is beyond caring about privacy. Having toys and convenience is much more exciting. Hopefully they're also conditioning future generations to become docile slaves of their workplaces.

moscaclem• 7 years ago

Once we all get old enough this will just be the crazy ramblings and no one will care. What the children are told and believe is true is what will be the truth.

Once we're all dead this won't even be an issue.

Maybe your old enough to remember a time when you could walk away and live somewhere without anyone from your old life being able to find you...I'm not.

Maybe you remember when "everyone" 15+ didn't have a constant connection to the internet or at least the police....I'm not.

Maybe you remember being able to go places alone as a child... I don't.

I remember being able to break school rules (running in the hall) and evade punishment because there was no way to prove it... these kids will not.

My great grandparents remember a time when going to another country didn't require the permission of your home country, when leaving your country meant you weren't a part of it anymore... I'd bet you do not.

--Edit (added conclusion)-- It seems like with each generation we become used to a little less freedom and a little more control. A little more comfort and a little less connection with the non man made world. Maybe this is how it's always been. Maybe it's just another by product of the agricultural revolution drawing us all closer together.

kickopotomus5• 7 years ago

It seems like with each generation we become used to a little less freedom and a little more control.

This has probably been true to a certain extent ever since we began organizing into tribes. However, I would put forward that even if you aggregate all of the liberty concessions humankind has made for the last few millennia, it would pale in comparison to the supreme control afforded by technological improvements of the last 20 years.

okhumans• 7 years ago

Disappointed to see the young being indoctrinated so early to accept the surveillance state.

shadowgovt14• 7 years ago

Unpopular prediction: The US of the future is going to look a lot like what we would currently consider a "surveillance state" than it does now, and on the whole that's going to be okay.

I think "Transparent Society" has the right idea; these technologies are ubiquitous and cheap, and the question of the near future isn't going to be whether they're deployed but who controls the feed. If we pretend the answer can be made to be "nobody," we're dodging the conversation that needs to be had.

stallmanite• 7 years ago

What if you’re outside what’s currently considered normal? I’m sure gay people would have loved a surveillance society in the 50s. What the fuck man?

delfinom2• 7 years ago

No, they are being to taught to hide their activities from the surveillance state, you think the teenagers in high school in their angst phase are going to accept it? Hah.

mattlondon• 7 years ago

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

umvi5• 7 years ago

Unpopular opinion: basically no one dies by guns in schools so don't even bother with clear backpacks.

zepto8• 7 years ago

Exactly. Force schools to quantify this risk against others. More kids die cycling to school than by guns.

TheSoftwareGuy• 7 years ago

Part of the problem is not just the actual risk, but the perception of risk. People deserve to not feel like they are going to be shot when they show up to an educational institution, and that feeling has been withering away lately

grecy5• 7 years ago

ummm, please explain?

Surely the US has by far the highest gun murder rate in schools among developed countries.

EDIT: The down votes are interesting - are you down voting because what I said is not true, or because you just don't like that it is true?

ajross2• 7 years ago

That's not an unpopular opinion, though it probably is on this site.

viridian2• 7 years ago

It's a very unpopular opinion w.r.t. to America.

Gallup conducts a firearms poll every year, and the closest thing to a total ban question is a total ban on handguns.

"Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?"

should be: 29

should not be: 70

no opinion: 1

systemtest• 7 years ago

Or just fix the underlaying issue. Switzerland has 2 million guns on 8 million citizens. Yet no school shootings. Why don't they have school shootings and can we apply the Swiss system to the United States?

ptah2• 7 years ago

it's not as easy to get guns in switzerland as in the US

GuiA• 7 years ago

There are still 6 times more guns per person in the US than in Switzerland. Looking at the numbers also shows that Switzerland is far from being an outlier in any way, so I'm not sure why the Swiss system is more interesting than the Austrian system or Swedish system in that regard.

There are just way too many guns in the US (i.e. "it's just way too easy to get a gun in the US").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

wbronitsky2• 7 years ago

This is a complete straw man. We are not discussing how many guns the Swiss have in absolute, not are we talking about how that could affect school shootings in the US. If we want to discuss the numbers, devices like ratios will serve us much better.

billfruit• 7 years ago

Another argument might be Mexico, they have gun control, but seems to be still having school shootings.

smileysteve• 7 years ago

Are you proposing military conscription? Because that is a large part of what arms Switzerland; and most of those 2 million guns are service weapons.

rtkwe3• 7 years ago

I mean if we're talking about Switzerland we have to talk about how their gun laws would be considered extremely draconian and unconstitutional in the US. [see 0] For starters all guns and ammunition purchases have what are essentially background checks, and it's much easier to lose the right to purchase, carry permits are basically non-existent and most transit is explicitly only to and from shooting ranges or hunting. Just saying there's lots of guns in Switzerland so guns aren't the real problem is very disingenuous and ignores the fact that as they've continued to restrict gun ownership to align with broader EU rules gun violence (including suicides) have dropped.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-o...

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

Yes, but if you actually address the root cause then you can't use shootings as an excuse for mass surveillance.

TheRealSteel• 7 years ago

This is actually a popular opinion in almost every developed nation except the US.

Kaiyou• 7 years ago

Only inside your personal echo-chamber, though.

some_random2• 7 years ago

"Restrict more, different rights to make us safer^tm"

shadowgovt14• 7 years ago

Most laws restrict some right to make us safer, and most laws succeed at that. For all the vehicular homicides in the US, there'd be more if we didn't require driving on the right-hand-side of the road and not driving on the sidewalk.

The question is always where the tradeoff point should be, not whether there's any tradeoff.

sojournerc• 7 years ago

First of all, making something illegal does not make it disappear, and you're also grossly overestimating the occurrence (as are the people calling for clear backpacks) of school shootings. The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens.

Consider that the news cycle and FUD have created a terrible availability bias in our country that increasingly leads to draconian actions like those mentioned in the article.

https://quillette.com/2019/11/29/the-availability-heuristic-...

slothtrop7• 7 years ago

you're also grossly overestimating the occurrence

The bodycount might not be "spectacular" but the rate of school shootings in the U.S. dwarfs other developed countries. Fatalities 200+ so far. At any rate, you don't know what they were 'estimating' exactly.

The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens.

Criminals retrieve their weapons through underground networks. School shooters do not. They're just students. They've either grabbed what was lying around at home or bought them. Such that, accessibility to school shooters is hampered were it the case that legal distribution were more restricted.

Add to the fact, circulation of guns in the underground is only possible and bloated because of the sheet number of legal guns.

twodave• 7 years ago

This, or literally any other action that isn't crazy in the sense of attempting to suppress personal privacy or the idea of protecting oneself. People want to feel safe and capable, not guilty and dependent.

philwelch5• 7 years ago

We’d still monitor them anyway, to make sure they’re not carrying scissors. Seriously: https://i.redd.it/hzigm9tmiyn21.png

jakebasile• 7 years ago

It's a good thing the innate right to self defense, from which the right to keep and bear arms is derived, is not subject to your unpopular opinion.

TurkishPoptart2• 7 years ago

Likely unpopular reply: nothing would really change.

shoes_for_thee• 7 years ago

yeah it'll be like when we made heroin illegal and then there was no more heroin.

jriot4• 7 years ago

You mean unconstitutional opinion.

kickopotomus5• 7 years ago

Quite honestly, the amendment should have been worded differently and I believe that is part of the reason we are in the mess we have found ourselves in today. For some reason, many Americans only ever seem to quote the final clause of the amendment:

    ..., the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

However, the meaning of the final clause is modified by what comes before it:

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, ...

Now, there are two important things to note:

1) in the context of the constitution, "person" or "persons" is used when referencing an individual or individuals but "people" is used when speaking generally about a collective group. This can also be seen in the 4th amendment:

    The right of the **people** to be secure in their **persons**, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...

2) Madison wrote the 2nd amendment as a way to provide the States recourse against a corrupt Federal government. At the time when the constitution was drafted, states were much more distinct and separate entities, and the revolutionary war was fresh on the mind so the ability for individual states to train there own militias was an important stipulation.

Bearing this in mind, I do not believe that the 2nd amendment was written as a right provided to individuals but instead as a right afforded to states.

jdkdnfndnfjd5• 7 years ago

I will never give up my right to carry a weapon. Liberals say they want to ban guns and then they turn around and foam at the mouth when cops try to take away the guns if it’s a black persons guns. I would consider giving up guns if liberals would let cops do stop and frisk. Or let cops do anything really.

But liberals don’t care because they live in their mansions, far away from any danger. And rich SV CEOs throw money at anti capital punishment efforts while they relax in their mansions where they are sure to never encounter anyone that it might be used on.

adamnemecek• 7 years ago

I dont get how the school can justify this.

nieksand• 7 years ago

People's views of the world have been drastically skewed by the news industry.

Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded.

Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year.

The news industry thrives on sensation. Politicians don't even wait for the blood to dry before leveraging drama for their cause. The schools are now just mirroring the public's ill-formed opinion. This is all great if you are preparing your kids to be cogs in a surveillance state. It is less great if you care about freedom.

shadowgovt14• 7 years ago

Hypothesis on the specific topic of cars vs. guns:

The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety. There is, perhaps, more to be done, but since the Constitution doesn't include a right to keep and bear cars, regulation and law in the space of publicly-operated vehicles is already large and mature.

The same is not true for firearms, which is why it's such a contentious topic in the US.

xwdv• 7 years ago

The point of clear backpacks isn’t to make sure they aren’t carrying guns, it’s to make sure they aren’t carrying drugs or other illicit material, which is a bigger problem and harder to control.

choward• 7 years ago

it’s to make sure they aren’t carrying drugs or other illicit material

"Make sure"? Yeah right.

tux1968• 7 years ago

This can't be right. It's too easy to put drugs inside a book or pencil case. For that matter it's mostly the same problem for a weapon too.

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

Well now that everything is done on laptops I'm sure they'll also ban you from bringing in anything besides your laptop. No pens, cases, books, etc.

twoquestions• 7 years ago

Why do they spend so many words talking about preventing self-harm and suicide? In my experience the school doesn't actually care, so long as they don't off themselves on school grounds. At least when kids died when I was at school, the administration was pitiless towards their siblings' assignments and attendance, and punished them for crying in grief.

HoppyHaus• 7 years ago

So that when somebody disagrees with this, they can go with the classic "So you support self-harm and suicide?".

rahuldottech3• 7 years ago

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance.

And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that data that's been collected on you your whole life will be used against you to give you a flawed AI-generated social "score" that determines what you can or cannot do, or to determine whether or not you're a "threat" (see: someone who speaks out against wrongdoings) to such a government.

krilly• 7 years ago

Which bit of this are you upset with specifically? Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless. I agree that kids getting conditioned to be okay with surveillance is bad, but this is all coming from the private sector right now.

In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned into a database to get a new phone. This has already been normalized by all the face swapping apps, like Zao. Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.

Symbiote3• 7 years ago

Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

Blocking has been standard in some workplaces, and stricter blocking has been standard in schools, but monitoring isn't. Small and medium businesses and academia often have little or no blocking.

No-one gets any alert if I write "I want to kill myself or maybe the president" here (over TLS), nor will they when you download this page. For some children, this does generate an alert -- even on a secure site.

rahuldottech3• 7 years ago

Blocking certain internet resources has been in place for decades, not constant monitoring.

Schools have started constant CCTV surveillance. Often with flawed AI systems in place. Clear bags and all these practices condition them to value their privacy less, which is a very bad thing.

Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.

Surely you understand why that's bad, right? What they're taught hasn't been updated in decades, whereas the world around them has changed so much. They're taught as kids not to trust strangers. Why are they not taught to not trust random apps?

lm28469• 7 years ago

Which bit of this are you upset with specifically?

To me the upsetting part is that these kids must feel unsafe / monitored. Which is exactly what they shouldn't go through in school, it's far from a good start in life.

But then again with all the school shootings I don't blame the security companies, it's a deep cultural/societal issue. It's similar to what happened in Europe in the last few years, now it's business as usual when soldiers in full gear + assault rifles patrol the streets in major cities or during big public events. It sucks but there isn't a perfect answer to the problem.

ptero2• 7 years ago

Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

What country are you talking about? Honest question, just curious. I am in the US, but even today many small and medium sized companies do not monitor internet (block parts, sure, but not monitor) and 10 years ago even large companies did not do it.

salawat• 7 years ago

You really shouldn't cite China as an example of anything being justifiably "normalized".

Furthermore, children can't actually accept T&C's as a matter of binding law. The fact they just push the button notwithstanding.

What has been normalized is legal predation (something parents should be paying attention to and warning children about as they get older), and apathy toward actively slapping down abusive corporate business models. This is showing indications of turning around, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

In terms of monitoring Internet usage at schools; it may be done to a point, but I'm far more concerned with the trend toward omnipresent physical surveillance through facial recognition or device fingerprinting. It's one thing to try to police content to appropriate subject matter for a school; it's completely different to start holding a child accountable to having a digital footprint to manage all the time. Adults can't even manage that responsibly, and I don't think forcing them to do it while they are young will play well with ensuring they understand how to navigate the physical world well.

Given the adversarial objectives of most technology companies, I can't see the sense in putting in the effort to basically manufacture "trained consumers" for big tech. I'd rather see them taught computing in general and gradually introduce them to software creation and program awareness so they can make their own decisions. Of course, that seems to end up the kind of thing you get at vocational schools instead of primary Ed nowadays.

blattimwind3• 7 years ago

That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

Monitoring work or school internet use without specific prior suspicion is illegal in the entire EU; so this level of surveillance may be "standard" in some countries, but hardly globally.

In China,

Not exactly the reference I was looking for, though from this perspective any level of surveillance is normal.

Mirioron6• 7 years ago

I'm most upset by internet monitoring. If I had had access to school devices and it had monitoring then I wouldn't trust the school with anything, because they wouldn't trust me with anything.

Clear backpacks is such an absurd thing that I still find it difficult to believe that adult human beings came up with such an idea in the name of security. It's something I'd only ever expect to encounter in a novel about a dystopian future.

mayneack2• 7 years ago

Not that it makes it more or less effective, but my public school in Birmingham Alabama required clear backpacks back in 1996

WilTimSon• 7 years ago

It's not just internet access though. They flag private emails as well, is that not a violation of privacy?

Also, I find this part highly disturbing: “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”

This is eerily close to a typical oppressive state. See a troublemaker, make up a rule that you can prove they broke, punish them. Not a similar scale, of course, but it's still pretty bad.

ryanmercer4• 7 years ago

The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless.

My fiance is a high school teacher, in the past two months they've had a student come to school with a handgun and be expelled and handed over to the police and another expelled for having legit dealer quantities (nearly a pound) of marijuana (packed and placed in mason jars in her backpack) in a state where it isn't legal at a state level.

I can see why some might want clear backpacks.

delfinom2• 7 years ago

The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless. I agree that kids getting conditioned to be okay with surveillance is bad, but this is all coming from the private sector right now.

I think you'll find the opposite effect. Kids are being taught to hide things far better than before. Increasing their privacy skills for their adult lives :D

magduf2• 7 years ago

In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned into a database to get a new phone.

Is it not possible to buy a used phone there? I got my last several phones on Ebay; like cars, they depreciate a lot in the first year or two, so getting a 1-2 year old model will save you a ton.

im_with_stupid2• 7 years ago

You have people teaching nihilism. This is the result of nihilism. If you want to eliminate this problem, then eliminate nihilism.

The solution to keep people from killing should focus on teaching others that life is not meaningless or worthless. Also, teaching kids humility wouldn't hurt either.

Edit: Perhaps this should be obvious, but teaching about nihilism is not teaching nihilism. People teach nihilism more, if anything, through their actions.

oliveshell• 7 years ago

[Citation Needed]

wbronitsky2• 7 years ago

Can you explain who is teaching nihilism to whom and where? In school, while I did not have a clear backpack and quite obviously had internet monitoring on someone else’s network, I was never, not once, taught nihilism. In fact, in my education through grade 12, most everything was filtered through a compassionate lens.

It’s not like I was taught that the Holocaust will happen again because humans are inherently bad and such everything is meaningless; instead it was that if we seek the goodness in the world we can prevent something like that happening again. Furthermore, if we were taught anything about nihilism, it would be that the Nazis used it to justify mass murder, which we were taught is the worst thing ever, because it is. Just my experience

doubt_me2• 7 years ago

.....?

entropea2• 7 years ago

We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance.

Credit Scores, Cell Phones, Social Media. These kids will be tracked for the rest of their lives whether they have clear backpacks and ssl mitm or not.

slowhand09• 7 years ago

Funny this article coming from the Guardian which I believe is a British publication. And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

detritus4• 7 years ago

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common.

I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves.

The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.

saiya-jin2• 7 years ago

I think London is there mainly for the amount of CCTV cameras everywhere. The difference between this and place like China is how these tools are used - British society is fair and democratic to a high degree, in China this was never the goal. Of course priorities might change over time.

Symbiote3• 7 years ago

The source for the London figure is this article: https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo...

Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.

sorokod• 7 years ago

Why would the situation in London influence your perception of the article's content?

whycombagator• 7 years ago

London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China

Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.

vkou• 7 years ago

And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv....

While I've no doubt that London is highly surveilled, that data is, to put it bluntly, horse droppings, and should never be cited.

If you look at the sources they cite for stats like "There are 2,985,984 cameras in Shanghai" (Wow, look at the precision on those figures! Six decimal points, if we express it in scientific notation!), you will find that they take a random unsourced number from a blog post from 2013, then add 20% to it 6 times over, because they assume (Also unsourced) 20% year-over-year growth.

Meanwhile, that same source claims that there are only 3,600 cameras in San Diego. As anyone who's ever been in a convenience store, bank, airport, or workplace can tell you, that's complete baloney. You can probably visit enough businesses in a normal day that will have you walk past 3,600 cameras. (And the source for that number? A news article about the city government installing 3,000 new intersection cameras. Apparently we are to believe that across all the businesses, government buildings, and private residences of San Diego, there are only 600 cameras.)

I'm not sure if the authors in question are just incredibly stupid, or incredibly intellectually dishonest... But my money is on the latter.

tl;dr - please think critically about your sources, especially when they reinforce a pre-conception that you hold. Most of the 'data' you can find on the internet is garbage.

raxxorrax3• 7 years ago

I think part of the problem of polarization is distrust in the respective other political isle. Constant surveillance and constant crises are probably key drivers here.

Some say it benefits security, but I think the calculation is flawed. You will never get engaged citizens in a open-air prison. People implementing these policies should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

rchaud• 7 years ago

I'd say that part of the problem is that surveillance data is monetizable, which increases every vendor's incentive to make that capability a fundamental part of the value proposition for the product or service.

balabaster• 7 years ago

The flip side of the coin is that kids learn from a very early age what it takes to slip past the surveillance net. The smart ones watch everyone around them get caught for infractions. Taking note. Quietly gathering data. Towing the line, purposely being caught for the occasional minor infraction so as not to appear too good to be true. Until one day, they disappear from prison in the middle of a storm and take the entire foreman's investment portfolio with them.

Oh wait, I think there was a movie about this...

ghostpepper• 7 years ago

What movie is it? I would watch it.

Joe-Z4• 7 years ago

Then most people are still living in a surveillance dystopia / prison to stick with your analogy

I‘d rather not be in prison than hoping I‘m the chosen one who gets out

madengr• 7 years ago

My daughters teacher was monitoring her and her friend instant-messaging each other on school issued laptops.

The got around it by using a Google doc to chat in real-time.

jessaustin2• 7 years ago

This scenario ends up being fairly elitist. Everyone should be free, and not everyone can crawl to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can't even imagine -- or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields; just shy of half a mile.

hindsightbias2• 7 years ago

The horse has left that barn. They're under surveillance from the moment they enter the maternity ward. The population of HN'ers who let a babysitter take care of their kids w/o a webcam is probably way below the general population.

Your kids will raise theirs under the watch of Alexa AI-Webcam and Apple Watch Child Protection kit.

And one day they'll sit on courts and find the Fourth Amendment quaint.

ddingus3• 7 years ago

Maybe. Quite a few of us are raising kids free range.

Ideally, we can also pass along what life can be like.

ddingus3• 7 years ago

I do not think so either.

My own kids escaped much of this, and I was an active parent.

Turns out, I am going to have to help another one, my granddaughter due to son's big fail and meth. (Not good, I have no words. It is all insane hard for him now)

Maybe we can largely home school, or potentially move.

When I compare my school experience to this mess?

Who knew? It all seems crazy and so very unnecessary.

The other disturbing trend is criminal records at increasingly young ages. When do kids get to learn from mistakes without being badly marked before they even come of age?

faissaloo• 7 years ago

This among the many reasons I don't want my children in the education system.

bb882• 7 years ago

A few observations:

1. Active shooters, while rare, have completely eroded our trust in our fellow humans. Either a gun is safe to bring into a school or it's not. If it's not, then why do we allow open carry/concealed carry permits in public spaces? Active shooters have been both kids and adults. You might make the case that kids can't handle firearms safely -- though I was once a kid with access to firearms and I knew how to handle them safely. (Don't take this paragraph to mean I'm pro/anti gun control. It's just an observation)

2. Public Schools are public property. Private schools are private property. In either case, it's perfectly legal to have a surveillance system.

3. Parents feel more comfortable knowing the school has a means to keep their children safe. After all the school is responsible for the children while they are at school. Worse, should something happen to a kid on school property, there will be a lawsuit claiming the school did not do everything in its power to protect the children -- hence the need for surveillance.

xabotage• 7 years ago

If it's not, then why do we allow open carry/concealed carry permits in public spaces?

It's often not allowed to carry in places like schools (varies depending on district or state). However, many pro-gun supporters make the argument that CC supposedly makes public spaces safer because active shooters don't really need a license to murder people anyway, so anyone carrying during a situation has more defense (just stating the argument, not certifying it's correctness). But I'm interested in hearing how often it's the case that some licensed idiot badly secures their weapon in a public space leading to an active shooter situation (and for this reason I definitely wouldn't trust students to CC. But I'm also not in favor of clear backpacks, as that similarly feels like a case of "solving the wrong problem").

palisade• 7 years ago

If you think that's bad. Check this out: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/webcam-spy-settlement/

flycaliguy• 7 years ago

What if exposing them to surveillance is actually educational? What if it helps them form models in their head that make noticing it’s overstep easier?

Maybe this elaborate demonstration of surveillance is being used as a teaching moment by a woke English teacher?

officeplant2• 7 years ago

I was born in the 80s and my dad was a network engineer with a hobby of privacy invasion. All computers in our house were open to remote login from him and all of our emails had to be through an email server he ran out of our home. Constant surveillance backfired on him in that it taught us how to be increasingly good at hiding activities and covering our tracks. Obviously that doesn't make up for the downsides of constant privacy invasion.

One side of things that has me worried is I recently spoke with my brother over the holidays and he's a highschool teacher. ALL of his students use VPN's to bypass the schools monitoring and blocks on what they can do. What has me concerned is how many of these students understand the implications of funneling all of their private data through VPNs and vetting their VPN choice in the first place.

asdff13• 7 years ago

When I was in highschool flash games were rising to prominance, and the admins naturally banned our favorite websites from the school network. We weren't savy enough for VPNs but we used proxies.

At this point I have a pretty flippant attitude to my private data because of how much is out there. Telemarketers know my number and personal details. Spam emails do too. Even snail mail junk.

My info has been bought and sold dozens of times by now, probably originally from Verizon as telecoms openly engage in this practice. VPNs leaking my info is the least of my worries, the cat is already far out of the bag.

However, what can these companies even do? Not like I engage with their targeted advertisements or junk mail. If my identity was actually stolen, credit card numbers sold, it would probably only be mildly annoying for a month or two rather than some catastrophic thing.

Chirael• 7 years ago

I hate to say it, but it's perfect training for the world they'll live in once they enter the work force. It's the same thing there - you have no expectation of privacy when you're using the organization's equipment, if you want to do something sensitive you have to use your own equipment and data plan, and even if you do that, you risk being disciplined for doing something personal on the organization's premises/time.

tim333• 7 years ago

The bigger problem is the issues that led to the surveillance - the get an AR15 and shoot up a school culture in the US or the iffy government in China. Both those would be / have been a problem without any surveillance (eg. 30m + deaths in China earlier). On the other hand in our evolutionary environment we lived is small groups where everyone knew what everyone was up to and in the modern world your tech tracks you - it's just kind of part of life that doesn't really cause problems if people are nice.

cj2• 7 years ago

I get that some people don't like this.

But the reality is that schools are a lot more dangerous than they were just 10 years ago.

If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response? (Perhaps the bigger picture political answer is "gun control", but that's not something schools can sit around a wait for to happen)

pas• 7 years ago

Does this actually help? How come a simple metal detector wasn't enough?

kaibee2• 7 years ago

But the reality is that schools are a lot more dangerous than they were just 10 years ago.

Do you have a source for this?

cj2• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Compare 2000's to 2010–2014 to 2015 to 2019.

elicash2• 7 years ago

Not trying to take a side (though I'm against clear backpacks and monitoring), but here's a chart I found quickly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/V8zMSpOAM50-sxWp--S6J...

Shootings are still rare, just less so.

nyolfen• 7 years ago

schools are safer across the board than ten years ago (all violent crime has been declining for all groups for 30 years); there are actually fewer shootings than there were in the 90s despite the media narrative. technology simply follows its own logic of control unless there are hard constraints.

rahuldottech3• 7 years ago

But the reality is that schools are a lot more dangerous than they were just 10 years ago.

Only in certain places in the western world, due to the governments refusal to implement gun control. Most countries haven't had a school shooting in decades (or ever).

Gun control doesn't work? Go tell that to the graves of children who died due to school shootings, just because the country they were born in refused to implement gun control.

It's frankly ridiculous to the rest of the world how easily people can buy guns in the US.

This is not a problem that can or should be solved with surveillance. It's a gun problem, that should be solved by making guns harder to get.

Edit: Why the downvotes? Is anything I've said not true? Please do explain.

swebs• 7 years ago

It's a gun problem

Then how come gun ownership is negatively correlated with homicides?

https://medium.com/@tgof137/gun-ownership-rates-do-not-predi...

diffeomorphism• 7 years ago

That doesn't seem to be the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#United_States

Then what's an appropriate response?

Get rid of the security theater and actually do something about the causes.

kd5bjo• 7 years ago

What's an appropriate response?

Work to heal the divides in the country and improve social cohesion. Figure out how to reinstill the sense of community that prevented these things over the course of history. Help all students find a supportive peer group.

yardie• 7 years ago

Child of the 90s here. Schools are a whole lot safer than ever before. In my time I've witnessed drug deals, assaults, armed robbery, knife and razor fights, and was aware of rape and sexual assault. We had to bring clear backpacks and pass through magnetometers daily. And not one of us felt safer for it. All of those crimes occurred despite increased security theater. This was also a majority minority school, none of those incidents rose to even local news. I guess we weren't the right socioeconomic bracket.

If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response?

Money. This country is literally running out of teachers. We do not have enough adults in a typical school to tutor, observe, and guide students. Adults don't want to do the adulting anymore and the kids are having to learn to fend for themselves. None of these technological "solutions" are there to make kids learn or keep them safe. It is there to save some money for responsibilities the schools no longer meet.

Symbiote3• 7 years ago

Water bottles must also be clear, so school officials can see the color of the liquid inside.

Given the huge range of drinks available in the USA, especially soft drinks, I'm curious to know what colour isn't acceptable.

huntertwo• 7 years ago

Is there something about bomb water that doesn't allow it to be made clear? Alcohol is already clear so they're not stopping that.

datenwolf• 7 years ago

Also a lot of harmful and/or combustible liquids are clear like water. Methanol, ethanol, propanol, acetone, benzene, cyclohexane are all highly combustible and colorless. Also concentrated nitric acid or concentrated sodium hydroxide lye are both colorless and cause severe chemical burns.

lolc5• 7 years ago

Don't write this on a school-owned laptop though! You shouldn't know about this. Why are you interested in this? What if it gives another kid ideas?

(That was sarcasm.)

_jal• 7 years ago

This was in the 80s, but I do recall when soda machines were first installed at my high school. One side effect was it became OK to roam the halls with cans, which meant you could pour vodka into them in your locker.

lzol• 7 years ago

I think it's mostly for chew spit. Depending on where you're at, it's still not uncommon for kids to be using chewing tobacco or snus during school hours. If you were sly with a colored bottle, you could spit all day and never get caught. I'm not saying this is a great reason, but this isn't totally illogical.

motohagiography• 7 years ago

Sort of consistent with the idea that U.S. public high schools prepare students for prison.

Why respect authorities or society at all when it's arbitrary like that. It teaches learned helplessness and corruption and creates crappy people. Public schools don't have money, and when they get it, they spend it on this? Private schools and homeschooling programs seem to have a bright future.

leggomylibro2• 7 years ago

My Aunt has a child in early middle school - years 6 through 9 or so, for people outside the US.

Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned about the microphone. And the kid is completely incapable of avoiding the more toxic aspects of social media and adtech, because the constant use of smartphones has become a central part of their education. At the age of what, 11-15?

I can only imagine what this is teaching the child. When we caught up over the holidays, they seemed to be more fed up and disgusted with technology than interested in it.

basilgohar2• 7 years ago

This is absolutely horrible. I feel so bad for your family.

There's already a plethora of studies about the negative impacts screen time may have on early child development and the development of their brains in particular. But even from the observable social aspect, the interactions with our smart devices with notifications always vying for our attention and flashing widgets distracting us, I'm really worried for kids who already have struggles with focus and attention.

I know that we get tired of the "sky is falling" rhetoric, but I will just point out that many aspects of modern life that have become "normal" for us are still bad. Sedentary lifestyle, short attention spans, need for constant entertainment, less time spent outdoors, larger processed food consumption – the health and social problems associated with all of these are just accepted now, and a couple of generations ago we didn't have them (at least, not to the same degree).

Was everything perfect before? No, of course not. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. We can adopt technology and progress responsibly, rather than w=recklessly as we have for the past few decades.

swiley• 7 years ago

Have they considered home schooling?

Often modern home schooling looks more like private school (because almost no one actually does it home, they send their kids to parent run “co-ops”) and you won’t have to deal with most of this stupidity.

The Co-op my sister went to banned smartphones inside the building. IMO that was a little extreme and made logistics more difficult than they needed to be but it meant they just focused on school work.

yowlingcat• 7 years ago

Absolutely fascinated by this -- my partner and I are projecting ahead a few years and I've wondered what this kind of home-schooling would be like. What do the financials look like?

shadowgovt14• 7 years ago

The constant use of smartphones has become a pretty central part of US culture. Shouldn't school reflect the environment the student is being taught to live in?

Mirioron6• 7 years ago

Yes, it's a good idea, but being forced to carry a device around with you that is used to track your movements is not okay. Parents need to be able to say no to that.

leggomylibro2• 7 years ago

The constant use of smartphones has become a pretty central part of US culture.

Only in the past several years, and in that time there's been a lot of pushback to it and a growing consensus that it is likely harmful when people don't moderate their usage. I was in high school less than 10 years ago, and phones of all kinds were banned. If a teacher saw an iPhone, it would be confiscated and your parent would have to pick it up.

The schools are optimizing for convenience and cost, not the cultural zeitgeist.

philwelch5• 7 years ago

That’s somewhat akin to providing schoolchildren with a rum ration because drinking alcohol is a central part of culture.

lom888• 7 years ago

Not to be flippant, but so is alcohol usage, should we encourage students to drink at school?

Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.

jriot4• 7 years ago

I don't own or use a smart-phone, why should my kid be forced to?

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

The comment isn't describing use of cell phones as a central part of US culture. It's describing tyrannical, invasive policies that happen to involve smart phones.

asdff13• 7 years ago

Ahh yes. I remember back in my day I was sent home if I didn't show up to school with my rotary telephone and a fresh copy of the Times under my arm. Essential components of US culture, after all.

vearwhershuh• 7 years ago

Social trust has been falling for decades[1], and will continue to fall.

All of these epiphenomena will get worse until we take social trust seriously.

[1] https://www.bi.team/blogs/social-trust-is-one-of-the-most-im...

microcolonel• 7 years ago

Well, if you keep fearmongering about this stuff, what do you think is going to happen?

jordanpg• 7 years ago

This looks like an XY problem[0] on a massive scale.

Because the grown-ups can't figure out how to solve the top-level problems, they are instead dealing with the low-level symptoms and applying band-aids.

It also reeks of political pork to me.

I admit that enumerating the top-level problems is politically fraught, but I think they can be neatly condensed into:

* that mass shootings occur, ever

* that we cannot control childrens' use of the internet in any meaningful way

* that children are seeing through the thin veneer of meaningfulness that life in the US is supposed to have (notably traditional career paths and religion)

I don't pretend to have easy answers, but see-through backpacks is security theater that is the stuff of Bruce Schneier competitions.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378/213169

doubt_me2• 7 years ago

wont doesn't mean can't. gotta make sure all the board members, directors, principals, and book companies cash in first otherwise were all communists it says so in this book I needed a code for it must be true.

mensetmanusman• 7 years ago

Interesting that this is the trade off:

Gun rights at the expense of privacy rights

zer0faith• 7 years ago

Sounds more like a prison than a school.

xyst• 7 years ago

An industry created on the basis of fear. We all know how that panned out after 9/11.

When will this country start addressing the root cause?

hereme888• 7 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they're creating psych profiles of these students, and at some point the data will be sold (or "shared"), as always.

spodek• 7 years ago

As important as privacy is, the longer-term issue is values slowly devolving as each generation sees something as normal. Just as, if we don't resist the pressures, these children will grow up to consider this article's situation as normal and accept yet more encroachment, we adults accept what would repulse previous generations.

The environment, for example, though I could pick obesity, teaching to the test, or any number of other examples. The "Crying Indian" public service announcements from the 70s https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/remember-single-tear-anti-... reveal that the amount of plastic and waste that we once considered a crying shame, we produce monthly today, and is increasing.

We consider pollution normal that our ancestors cried at. Remember the first time you saw a picture of a beach covered in plastic junk? Now there are millions of such images. How many of us have plastic bottles next to our computers despite a tap giving healthier water a few steps away? How many of us ordered junk we knew we'd throw away manufactured twelve time zones away, knowing the pollution it would cause, but everyone else does it and that's just the way things are now?

We used to consider splitting atoms a crazy alternative to lower population growth. Now, especially in this community, people want more of it. Do you consider nuclear energy a solution instead of a symptom of deeper problems? Think of it from the perspective of the past, when there was more natural abundance per person. At the same time, think of how future generations may value greater encroachments into their freedom and privacy that we would consider unacceptable today.

The top post on this thread starts, "THIS IS NOT OKAY." How much that we consider okay today would past generations have judged "NOT OKAY"? If we would want future generations to claw back to now if these trends continued, should we claw back to a less-polluted world? To a more fit world? To an educational system that helps mature children into responsible, capable adults, not excellent sheep?

Thriptic2• 7 years ago

Poor, emotion driven risk management as usual. School shootings kill very few people per year and are rare events (especially in places that can afford this tech) despite what the New York Times would have you believe. Why not focus efforts on things that actually do kill young people, namely:

* Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively)

* Suicides (provide better mental health services)

* Violence that occurs outside of school (intervene to stop conflict before it becomes an issue, which would also help prevent these shootings)

* Opiods

therealdrag0• 7 years ago

Furthermore, you could probably provide a number of free lunches for the cost of the surveillance tech and laptops for every student.

kristopolous• 7 years ago

There's always money for punitive controlling "solutions". There needs to be a politically active obnoxious block always bellowing about it as unnecessary and a waste of money relentlessly for something to happen because apparently that's the only way things happen

ip26• 7 years ago

Why not focus efforts on things...

Automobiles are something of a sacred cow. Even outside your neighborhood school, prioritizing pedestrians & cyclists, traffic calming, and the like are an uphill battle because it is inconvenient to drivers.

asdff13• 7 years ago

I've seen schools with underground tunnel crossings as well as pedestrian overpasses. However, if you research why these piece of infrastructure were built, usually it's a sad story of a kid getting killed by a car which made everyone suddenly realize how absurdly dangerous crossings are for small children. Safety infrastructure is built with blood.

bobbles• 7 years ago

Comments like this look absolutely insane to anyone outside the US. Look at the numbers: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/21/us/school-shooting-us-ver...

sdinsn6• 7 years ago

Comments like this look absolutely insane to anyone outside the US

No, it looks insane to the 6 countries mentioned in your article that have significantly less schools shootings.

The other 188 countries in the world are purposely not discussed, since many of them have extremely high violent crime rates despite restrictive gun control laws...

zulln• 7 years ago

Yes, US has a lot of school shootings compared to other countries. But it is not like all those other countries use surveillance to prevent it, the problem is elsewhere.

Thriptic2• 7 years ago

I agree, let's look at the numbers. ~ 300 school shootings in ten years averages out to 30 a year. There are about 100,000 schools in the US. That's a risk rate of 0.03% per school per year risk. Considering that very few people within a given school die per attack, this means that your risk of being killed in a school shooting is basically negligible. Further, your article talks about ANY shooting on school grounds including gang shootings, domestic violence (adults), and accidental firearms discharges so A. almost certainly incidents will be clustered and a middle class school in some random place like what's in the article will have far less overall risk, and B. the actual number of real shootings of the kind that would make the news is far less than 300 over ten years.

The risk of being involved in every other incident class I listed is higher, so that is where we should be focusing our efforts because ultimately a death is a death regardless of what people are scared of. This is basically the terrorism problem: terrorism in the US is this big scary boogieman until you actually look at the data and realize that there's very little terrorism. The school shootings make the news precisely because they are very rare and surprising (and because some media outlets have readership that is in favor of strict gun control so it will play well).

If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.

uncletaco• 7 years ago

Not saying it's ok but there is a fair amount of schadenfreude to be had knowing that stuff they made me do in the 90s going to predominantly black schools causes so much outrage when applied to everyone else.

That being said schools shouldn't feel like prison. Students shouldn't feel like their privacy and agency is forfeit. They should not feel subhuman.

apexalpha• 7 years ago

Hey these clear backpacks actually look pretty cool.

JohnBooty• 7 years ago

Should schools be monitoring students' communications?

No, but these are important lessons for kids to learn.

1. Don't trust somebody else's device, such as a school- or work-issued device.

2. Learn to use social media responsibly. Your public social media output is.... public. Don't put things on social media if you don't want them potentially used against you.

discreditable• 7 years ago

I work IT at a school. I try to strike a balance. I try to avoid doing creepy things in the name of security theater. I don't do TLS MITM, even though it might make web filtering easier. We do have some classroom monitoring software, but it can only be used while students are on our network.

I agree that there is a bit too much reliance on technical measures (ex: monitoring software) to police computer usage. This can be in absence of teaching kids personal responsibility. However, in a classroom environment it helps teachers immensely. While 80% of your students might handle themselves mostly, trying to police those remaining manually can eat up a lot of instructional time.

One point on the article:

Teenagers are warned that the school is tracking what they do, and that they can get in trouble for visiting inappropriate websites.

If the school gets gov funds for IT, they have to be CIPA compliant[0]. This includes filtering adult websites and logging access to them. Fail to do so and you lose access to a lot of government funding through E-Rate[1]. The law is vague and somewhat up to school admin interpretation. I've seen some pretty intense surveillance regimes implemented in the name of CIPA.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Internet_Protecti... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Rate

hellisothers• 7 years ago

It’s all part of the Fae agenda:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...

dsalzman• 7 years ago

If you really want to dig deep into the pervasive surveillance of young children research companies like https://www.bark.us/schools . They fear monger parents with suicide prevention and child porn to fully monitor all digital activity of students. This is a cultural regression for our children.

possiblerobot• 7 years ago

The schools will argue that surveillance of students promotes safety and good behavior. That might be true up to a point. But, they're missing out on the opportunity to teach a deeper, more important lesson, which is how to behave when you're not being watched.

Would we rather live in a society where people are only doing the right thing because they're being watched, or where people do the right thing because they've internalized morals and ethics so it doesn't matter if they're watched?

I'd argue the latter is better. Merely pleasing your watchers is not personal responsibility. It's control and confinement to whatever you think the watchers want to see. But, when/if the surveillance rails come off, then what happens? Then we have people who have never stood on their own ethical two feet.

johnjungles• 7 years ago

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die.... Does the news reflect what we die from? No

Death from terrorism is 4000X over represented in the news

roryokane2• 7 years ago

fixed link: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

No government is going to give you the education required to overthrow them.

carapace• 7 years ago

From my POV this is the natural continuation of an already-fucked-up situation.

The rights of children have historically been neglected, and so we inflict on them what we dare not inflict on ourselves.

I realized as a child that my parents were sending me to a fucked up place. They did it because they were out to lunch and not paying attention. I've never understood why most people, who sincerely love their children, send them to these places.

Education per se is the secondary reason for their existence. The primary reason is conformity, which they are much more successful at achieving (than education.)

The single, simple metric to tell whether or not your school system is actually educational is the ratio of teachers to children. The range of 1/6 is probably the upper limit. You might get away with 1/10 if the teacher is truly magical. The modern ranges pr 1/20 - 1/40 are absurd. Fucked up Lord of the Flies shit goes down when you get that many kids together w/o adequate supervision. You were all children once, you know what I mean.

Modern "school" systems are hell-worlds. If you love your children, don't send them to hell-worlds.

jdkdnfndnfjd5• 7 years ago

What year did you graduate high school? I graduated 2010 and I cannot agree with you more. Public schools are a demented crossbreed of daycare, zoo with some prison culture mixed in.

Recently I’ve had a change in opinion though. I started volunteering at a daycare because I am so passionate about the shortcomings of public schools. And working with the kids has made me realize that most of them have no problem with public schools. Most of them aren’t smart enough to benefit from better education. True intellectual curiosity is very rare. And most of them enjoy the petty games of social hierarchy that dominate in public schools.

The one aspect of my opinion that hasn’t changed is that there should be more discipline. Bring back the paddle and rules. Boys need it psychologically, order and structure and consequences.

dcbadacd• 7 years ago

I don't think it's the ratios like 1/20 to 1/40 that are the cause, it's children in those classes. There was a HN thread about magnet/gifted schools and how they made a night-and-day difference in terms of quality of education and wellbeing for quite a few kids, just because there weren't disruptive/mean people there. That's what I've personally witnessed as well. I don't think homeschooling has any hope of beating a well-educated teacher in a good learning environment, that's what we should strive for really.

gcbw3• 7 years ago

This has been happening since the 80s. We all seen metal detectors and such in low income schools. But we all just laughed it from movies while we continued to work on our cozy advertising and data collection jobs. Maybe even buying the Coolio soundtrack.

Now that it reached your own kids, only now, it is outrageous.

zaidf• 7 years ago

My middle school (late 90s) in Savannah, GA required clear backpacks though I think the main concern was students concealing drugs.

deevolution• 7 years ago

Well yes, why wouldnt you expect clear backpacks? There are so many shootings. Before we know it every public school student is going to have to go thru TSA security checkpoints before attending class because Americans are free and allowed to own guns.

yters• 7 years ago

Should bring back rifle class. When I was in Kandahar airfield it was full of teenagers carrying around fully automatic assault rifles. There was never any gun crime. I wonder what was different?

nsm• 7 years ago

Cory Doctorow had a book about this over a decade ago (2008). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...

Prescient.

DoubleGlazing• 7 years ago

The UK's "Prevent" scheme is a good example of why school surveillance is a bad thing. It was setup to try and prevent religious radicalization, specifically Islamic. All it did was make Muslim student feel constantly spied upon and afraid to express opinions, lest they and their families find themselves under investigation... But then it spread beyond religion to includes political issues, for example stopping a 14 year old boy from helping out at anti-fracking protests. Truly Orwellian stuff.

As an aside my brother-in-law has been battling his childrens school for several years because he refuses to allow their school issued laptops to connect to his home network. The laptops use a proprietary WiFi setup dialog that states the network password will be saved to the cloud with no option to opt out. The school doesn't understand why he would be concerned with that.

telcal• 7 years ago

It all starts with Elf on the Shelf to get kids used to being surveilled on a constant basis ;)

Valord• 7 years ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...

roryokane2• 7 years ago

Yes, it sounds very relevant. The first sentence of the first chapter: “I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.”

Download the book for free: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

ruxx• 7 years ago

How this kids, when they arrive to adulthood, will be able to stand for their rights? They are tough to, with the collaboration of their parents to give them away, and to see it as a necessary evil.

stjohnswarts• 7 years ago

Parents seem clueless that they are raising a generation of sheep when it come to government (and corps) invading their privacy. It really is a shame that parents teach them to be suspicious of anyone with power to force them to do anything.

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

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