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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] t34543|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moscaclem|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ptero|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoBrad|6 years ago|reply
Counterpoint to your conditioning point: kids tend to rebel against oversight, and will probably include this in the list of things they reject.
[+] [-] goodluckchuck|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] entropea|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] leggomylibro|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] basilgohar|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahuldottech|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] balabaster|6 years ago|reply
Oh wait, I think there was a movie about this...
[+] [-] slowhand09|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorrax|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] officeplant|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ddingus|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] hindsightbias|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Chirael|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropea|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tim333|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flycaliguy|6 years ago|reply
Maybe this elaborate demonstration of surveillance is being used as a teaching moment by a woke English teacher?
[+] [-] palisade|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faissaloo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im_with_stupid|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krilly|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bb88|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Thriptic|6 years ago|reply
* 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
[+] [-] bobbles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealdrag0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ip26|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] discreditable|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mattlondon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemtest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanpg|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] twoquestions|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] possiblerobot|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] okhumans|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symbiote|6 years ago|reply
Given the huge range of drinks available in the USA, especially soft drinks, I'm curious to know what colour isn't acceptable.
[+] [-] motohagiography|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vearwhershuh|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] uncletaco|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DoubleGlazing|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Valord|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...
[+] [-] spodek|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
Gun rights at the expense of privacy rights
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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