John Harris, writing in CiF about the ubiquitous surveillance of students in American schools, that sends a chill down the spine.
So reads a passage from the opening pages of Lockdown High, a new book by the San Francisco-based journalist Annette Fuentes. Subtitled “When the schoolhouse becomes the jailhouse”, it tells a story that decisively began with the Columbine shootings of 1999, and from across the US, the text cites cases that are mind-boggling: a high-flying student from Arizona strip-searched because ibuprofen was not allowed under her school rules; the school in Texas where teachers can carry concealed handguns; and, most amazingly of all, the Philadelphia school that gave its pupils laptops equipped with a secret feature allowing them to be spied on outside classroom hours.
If you don’t find that frightening, then you’ve been missing something somewhere along the way. Some time, while we were sleeping this past couple of decades, Orwell’s future became our present. It is one thing to have some sort of monitoring of behaviour in the school grounds, but it doesn’t need the blanket use of technology to spy on the minutia of students’ lives and it most certainly doesn’t involve fingerprinting them and spying on them outside of the schoolyard. That really is beyond the pale.
Harris muses upon this as it creeps across the pond. Too late, mate, it’s already here and has been for a while now (and it happened on your beloved Labour party’s watch). Where have you been all this time?
Your closing link fails to make the point. As I understand it (and bearing in mind it’s the BBC reporting, so that can be tricky) it’s about a very small group of daft students, voluntarily taking part in a rather silly and pointless ‘research’ experiment. It’s hardly Orwellian, by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, at least the kids on the BBC report could simply dump their garbage in another bin.
Perhaps a better example might have been the finger print schemes used by some school libraries – kids prints being often obtained without parents knowledge or permission.
It demonstrates the next stage in the process. Not only are these people so conditioned to the idea that they are volunteering to be spied upon, they are willingly spying on others. That along with the ritual humiliation element makes it positively Maoist. So, yes, very relevant.
For these and many many other reasons my Parents refused to send me to a Public School in the States. I went private and very grateful I am too. Though, at least there it is possible to leave Public School and get into a good College. It’s because they still have ability streaming I guess (AP). The proportion of State School kids getting into top UK Universities is disgracefully low. Maybe one in five of my St Andrews friends were.
One thing sticks out from the above:
“the school in Texas where teachers can carry concealed handguns”
The rest is a catalogue of fabian tyranny. This is actually part of the fight-back against the post-Columbine descent.
Did everyone catch the story a while back of the school (in Philadelphia I think) which handed out computers to the kids and was watching them through the in-built camera when they were at home in their bedrooms?
The handguns doesn’t bother me as the USA allows people to carry guns. Given the problems they’ve had with rogue pupils going shootabout, this is a reasonable response. Far more effective that a blanket gun ban as someone will be able to respond and stop the shooting spree.
As for the computers spying on pupils story, yes, that is mentioned in the article cited and is without doubt an example of pure wickedness.
Completely and utterly over the top, a runaway horse but how to rein it in?
As I understand it in Texas, it is not a case of teachers “allowed” to carry guns. It is a case of “Try and take it off me, and I will drag your cold dead arse through every court in the fucking country, pal!”
But of course “allowed” means these wet, hand wringing, anti gun bastards, can sit back and say “See? NO one tells ME what to do!”