Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler, authors of “Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools,” explore the software and technology systems employed in K-12 schools and higher education institutions that surveil students, erode minors’ privacy rights and, in the process, discriminate against students of color.
Before running for Congress to challenge the corruption of a leading corporate Democrat who played a key role in enabling the surveillance state, I worked for 15 years as a civil liberties advocate focused on building protections for First and Fourth Amendment rights that it has undermined. Thinking of mass surveillance as offending only privacy does a disservice to the further array of issues that are implicated, including freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and the capacity for meaningful democracy (which relies on the right to hear the opinions of vulnerable neighbors who silence themselves when aware that they are being monitored).
Another resource offered by my former colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Surveillance Self-Defense Guide. https://ssd.eff.org/ It presents a number of teaching tools that can be helpful for anyone looking for ways to insulate their communications, associations, or conscience from the threat of government omniscience.
When my kids were small and suffering from learning disabilities related to an autoimmune condition, I became-- at least for a time-- a proponent of cameras in classrooms. This was after each child came home with injuries from two different schools and both schools attempted to cover up what turned out to be violent and unjustified assaults by staff.
At the time, we pulled the kids from these schools on medical leave and homeschooled while attempting to file civil rights complaints. But-- hello Kafka-- it turned out the DOE OCR lawyers were former colleagues and drinking buddies of one of the school's sleazy attack dog attorneys. I found it even more Kafkaesque that, when we confronted the school attorney an OCR lawyers about this glaring conflict, they seemed so assured of their own power and our powerlessness that they didn't even bother to conceal the conflict. This had pretty predictable results: though our cases were well documented, backed by medical reports of injuries and both our children could clearly describe the unwarranted attacks, OCR-- after treating us with sneering contempt for more than a month-- dropped both cases on a lame technicality.
It was a horrifying, hope-and-happiness-killing, crushing experience, especially discovering that there's really no reliable legal recourse against abuse of disabled students. No legal authority in the state would step in and even the ACLU refused to take the cases citing lack of expertise in special education. Even private attorneys who'd fought valiantly for church sex abuse victims refused to meet with us for the same reason and special education attorneys would not work on contingency because, as several confessed, there's simply no way to win. On learning that the cost of even trying to fight the schools would be six figures + and the children might be adults by the time any of it resolved, we thought the funds would be better spent on trauma therapy and educational resources while the kids were still actually kids.
Partly as a way to deal with my own trauma over these events, I got involved with the very few activist collectives attempting to address the issue of school abuse of the disabled. I was radicalized in the process, especially when I learned that, since the late 90's, an estimated 1 to 3 disabled individuals-- mostly children-- died every week in schools and institutions due to dangerous disciplinary practices like restraint and seclusion.
Because there's been no attempt to curb these practices in the intervening years since the last assessment, one can only imagine that the body count has grown in the last three decades. Yet there's still no official central database tracking these deaths so it's anyone's guess how many disabled children are being injured and killed every year since. According to the GAO, most of these deaths occur due to disabled children being uncooperative or "disruptive," not-- as the Association of School Administrators repeatedly claims in defense of restraint and seclusion practices-- due to children being a danger to themselves or others. What's worse, according to other research, regional coroners will often collude with schools in student death cases and, exactly like Nazi-era doctors whitewashing the murders of child victims of the T4 program, reportedly often list these restraint or seclusion deaths as "cardiac insufficiency."
Anyway, this is why I and others once thought classroom surveillance might be the answer. But the devil is in the details and, the more specifics I learned about the incremental privatization of schools, the more I understood that the treatment of disabled children isn't precisely accidental but, in fact, systemic. According to reports collected by Diane Ravitch, in the current "testocracy" (by which private scholastic testing corporations profit off the taxpayer teat), since staff merit pay in public schools depends on student test curves and since 90% of disabled students will predictably fail or bring down the curves of these tests, it strongly suggests that individual schools and individual educators are highly incentivized to shuffle disabled students off to private institutional "disability gulags" (where the injury and death counts are statistically far higher) and deny these students constitutionally guaranteed free and appropriate public education.
Actually killing students via brutal and unnecessary "disciplinary" practices may be unintentional "overkill" so to speak, but there appears to be a general momentum towards discouraging families from demanding inclusive public education that can have predictable deadly outcomes.
All told, cameras in classrooms started looking more and more like putting cameras on the Titanic., including the predictable outcome that those with the most to hide would do everything they could to make video evidence inaccessible in order to avoid consequences and bad PR. According to Wrightslaw, this is what mostly happens when schools adopt classroom video surveillance policies. Though schools that adopt these policies are often happy to use video evidence to feed the school-to-prison pipeline, the same evidence has a way of getting lost when it shows institutional abuse of student rights and safety. Or else schools successfully argue to block public access to the evidence based on-- irony of ironies-- the "privacy rights" of students.
Before this gets too depressing... long story short, we ultimately decided to leave the country and educate our kids in a more humane political environment with a bonus free public health system. The kids are now accomplished and generally healthy bilingual art and music students. We invite their teachers to holiday parties and have grown very close to several. Since we got here, we never even had an impulse to demand video surveillance of the kids' classrooms because our gut instincts as parents were never rattled to that degree.
I mention the above because I hope those analyzing related issues might understand there are some of very ugly "protection racket" dynamics that influence regular Joe Americans to accept or even seek extreme surveillance in schools. Understanding these "devilish details" might help those trying to counter and argue against these surveillance policies.
Thank you for this horrifying but important information. In some countries it is the law that classrooms for children must have clear glass windows so that lessons can be observed at any random time. I wonder if this system helps. I used to work with children in very deprived neighborhoods and the reports of abuses by teachers were rampant, especially of children with racial, linguistic, cognitive, or behavioral differences. I desperately wanted to institute these type of laws.
Thank you. All's well that ends well as they say and it's quite clear these experiences are part of why my kids are now such cheerful radicals and social justice mavens. But not all ends well for everyone. Dead kids don't grow up to be anything. Neither do a lot of repeatedly traumatized kids.
I have a friend and fellow "hyperactivist"-- without whom there would be no movement to outlaw things like face-down prone restraint and seclusion chambers in schools-- who remains a stubborn advocate for cameras in classrooms. and also believes charter schools are the answer. Though I'm no longer in the camera camp and was never a fan of charters, I can't harshly judge this individual because of the unimaginable loss her family endured. Her son, who was once only mildly disabled but, after years of being thrown on the floor and held down by school staff for the slightest infraction without his family's knowledge or consent, no longer leaves his room, barely speaks and has aged out of services. The only remedy offered was major sedatives which ended up causing disabling tardive dyskinesia. The drugs were quickly discontinued but the movement disorder is permanent and seems to have snowballed-- as it statistically does more often than med-pushers admit-- into early dementia.
About ten years ago and right after their own ordeals, my kids met this young man and still feel survivor guilt towards him because it was his mother's monumental, single-handed data collection, awareness-raising and warnings that saved their necks. The only reason I was able to overcome my paralyzing shock and act quickly to remove my children from dangerous schools was because of her work. Her son died while still breathing so others could be spared.
I feel like an idiot that I ever once lobbied for surveillance technology as a remedy to protect disabled children. But I think we're all being frog-boiled into moving deck chairs (or installing cameras or observation windows) on the Titanic rather than recognizing that the whole ship is sinking by design. As Ravitch paints it, the privatization of public education is following the same "defund, defame and privatize" pattern as the liberalization of everything else like water, prisons, policing, postal services, etc.
In short, from a certain angle, staff abuse of students arguably hastens privatization so there's little incentive to change the organizational dynamics which increase risk of abuse. The same year my tiny, nonviolent, loving marshmallow son (because he reached out and gently pulled a twig from a female student's long hair-- a memory that still makes me weep in despair because he was pre-branded and preemptively punished as some kind of deadly Lennie from Mice and Men due to his disability) was physically dragged out of a classroom and shoved into a seclusion chamber that doubled as a janitor's supply closet, a film came out titled Won't Back Down. The film presented charter schools as the salvation and remedy for this precise type of abuse. I nearly puked when I saw the trailer because I recognized the same old neoliberal protection racket message. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7SLGSmAsw
But, because childhood and the window to educate children is so brief, most parents-- in particular those who can't afford to homeschool or or leave the country or send children to groovy alternative schools (or whose children aren't eligible because Montessori and Waldorf largely reject disabled kids)-- are hostages.. So sometimes we move chairs around and call for more surveillance and, like most embattled and stressed and distracted people, may miss the frying-pan-to-fire danger of doing these things.
I'm sure the remaining educators with souls are suffering similar confusion-- if they haven't yet fled the profession due to PTSD. When I started pitching in to support special ed advocacy attorneys lobbying to ban certain dangerous restraint practices, I met quite a few former teachers who'd had to quit due to trauma.
As a side note, I think it's important to point out that neoliberal policies aren't the sole cause of brutality in education. Part of it is just that humans kind of suck if not regulated and given oversight. In researching issues related to abuse by school staff, I learned something very interesting. Though the education apparatus would love to pretend that corporal punishment of students in public schools has been banned in most regions due to the abiding humanity of modern educators and maybe teleological "human progress," history tells a much different story. It seems that, back in the day when schoolmasters would regularly thrash misbehaving students, it wasn't unheard of that outraged family members in the US might hunt down the thrashers and either assault or shoot them.
Just to be clear, I'm not condoning vigilantism. But I would like to give an early warning to anyone interested in why school surveillance and data-mining are gaining a foothold among the public. The real nitty gritty info lies in how disabled students are treated, not only economically disadvantaged and minority students. This is especially true because the primary victims of deadly school abuse are disadvantage minority students with disabilities. I would encourage anyone seeking to correct the current trajectory to embed themselves down among disability families-- particularly those of minority and economically disadvantaged status-- to learn of the truly staggering horrors that may be driving
the public into neoliberal protection racket traps.
I never felt the need to have children, but if I had, I could no longer have them in this country. My advice to any young parent would be to keep a baby off the grid. No SS#, no formal ID. Keep them off the web, and find ways to make that work, because once you’re in that maelstrom, there’s no getting out. This interview shows that there’s no one too young to be harvested by the corrupt and immoral state. Is this a conspiracy theory? You bet it is.
A thousand thanks for this supremely important information. And thanks also for scouring the world for injustice. It would be the work of a lifetime just to write about Gaza, and those heartbreaks. That you find time to address so many other issues is appreciated.
“they're just going through mental health challenges, which is a part of life for some folks.”
Students “need to feel comfortable to be able to make . . . mistakes.”
Actually, “mental health challenges” are “a part of life” for all “folks,” all day long every day . Therefore we all need to feel comfortable, all day long, every day, about making mistakes. And therefore we all have all sorts of things to hide, because we must laboriously process the vast, teeming confusion that is our minds in order to produce the behavior of a civilized adult. That the human mind is a vast, teeming confusion is obvious both from ordinary experience to anyone with an interior life, and from a slight acquaintance with any kind of psychodynamic psychology. “I have nothing to hide” is the motto of someone who has internalized his identity as an object of totalitarian control. This motto is another version of “I love Big Brother.”
The surveillance described in this interview is part of the creeping totalitarianism of modern American culture. The election of Trump is merely a single, spectacular symptom of this disease. In order to understand our creeping totalitarianism, it is necessary to look beyond its manifestations on the behavioral level, whether in educational institutions, electoral politics, or elsewhere. It is necessary to look to its foundation, which is in the human mind.
In this regard, it is illuminating to consider in particular the nature of the development of the superego (the conscience). A child learns “the difference between right and wrong.” This is the necessary beginning of the development of the superego; but on this level the superego is still crude and immature. A great many people never progress beyond this level. On the lowest range of this level are psychopaths, who have little or no conscience. But most people who never develop above this level are those people who have conformist or authoritarian personalities. They act mostly mindlessly and mechanically, on the basis of a simplistic, literal-minded, fundamentalist conscience. We have been discovering to our horror that such people constitute large subcultures in our society.
A considerable number of people progress above this level, to develop a more highly-informed and flexible conscience. They are consequently able to adapt conscientiously and creatively to the multifarious and unpredictable vicissitudes of life. The people who progress to this level constitute the general multitude of a reasonably civilized society.
But as the bloody smear that is history shows, the conscience of the general multitude of people who make up a reasonably civilized society is still not a fully-developed conscience. To become a fully developed individual, one must develop a fully individualized conscience. That is one reason why, for example, we read Chris Hedges, who always challenges and informs our conscience (even if we don’t always agree with him). But experience shows plainly that society does not want people to develop this higher level of individuality and conscience. Society, even a reasonably civilized one, does not want its members to become fully-developed, unpredictable individuals with minds of their own. It wants them to be conformists whom it can control. Consequently, in order to fully develop one’s individuality, one must develop a private and individual superego, or conscience—a conscience of which society knows nothing, and of which few others (except, often, one’s partner) know very much. Nor is it only people who have developed to a high level of individuality who need to have a private conscience of which society knows nothing. Almost everyone is capable of acting on the most highly-developed level of conscience on some occasions, or in some aspects of life. This part of almost all of us is humanity’s saving remnant. Therefore it is this innermost part of us, hidden far away even from its expressions in educational, political, or other outward aspects of our lives, that society seeks to eradicate. The Benthamite panoptical prison in which contemporary society is incarcerating us with computer technology, all day long, every day, will be incomparably more total than any previous totalitarianism.
We must attack the branches that grow from the poison tree of surveillance, several of which are informatively and admirably described in this interview. But these branches will simply grow back more luxuriant than before unless we attack their root, which is society's incomprehension of the fact that there is nothing that is real or meaningful except in relation to the life of an individual human being. All true education is a process that takes place in the mind of the individual. All true teaching is an act of one human mind helping another human mind to think for itself--in the Buddhist figure, like a spark in a forest fire leaping from one tree to another and setting it on fire. Consequently, to use computer technology to mechanically intervene between the mind of a teacher and a student, and therefore to obstruct true teaching, is intrinsically evil. Take the first step through that gate, and you’re already lost. It is not something that can be reformed.
Benedict Anderson shows in “Imagined Communities” how the newly-refined census was used by colonial powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create identities for counting and classifying the “natives”—identities that did not actually exist except as abstract, arbitrary, and contrived census-categories created in the fantasy-worlds of the colonizers. Through a complex chain of events, these “identities” eventually became reified in real people, in ways of course that benefitted their colonial masters. In our time, just as forcing people into colonially-invented census-categories of identity had negated their true identities as individuals, using computer technology to help educate people who did not ask for such help is to negate and destroy education in the name of education. The only true education is helping people to learn to think for themselves. The computerization of education is a device for reifying totalitarian fantasies of human identities, in the form of living human beings in their formative years, so they can better serve their masters.
It's very disturbing knowing that children's brains are being wired to know that everything they do online is being monitored and tracked and have to accept it.
Do you think Orwell didn't know that the masses would go along with the propaganda? I would think Orwell would fear that we are all watched, AI and govt., with means to silence and arrest, including for thought crimes. And now, the young are indoctrinated into this as normal. Older people too, but we know of a different way of life.
Remember when everyone hankered after their fifteen minutes of fame? Now the unattainable holy grail is privacy. Those who can afford it will pay large fees to online scrubbing services to wipe all their personal info off the web.
Before running for Congress to challenge the corruption of a leading corporate Democrat who played a key role in enabling the surveillance state, I worked for 15 years as a civil liberties advocate focused on building protections for First and Fourth Amendment rights that it has undermined. Thinking of mass surveillance as offending only privacy does a disservice to the further array of issues that are implicated, including freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and the capacity for meaningful democracy (which relies on the right to hear the opinions of vulnerable neighbors who silence themselves when aware that they are being monitored).
I wrote recently about those issues (at https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/i/151523320/democracy-mattersbut-it-means-more-than-democrats-think) and previously organized the Electronic Frontier Alliance, a national grassroots network among local organizations offering resources in their respective areas that include digital security trainings. https://efa.eff.org/
Another resource offered by my former colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Surveillance Self-Defense Guide. https://ssd.eff.org/ It presents a number of teaching tools that can be helpful for anyone looking for ways to insulate their communications, associations, or conscience from the threat of government omniscience.
When my kids were small and suffering from learning disabilities related to an autoimmune condition, I became-- at least for a time-- a proponent of cameras in classrooms. This was after each child came home with injuries from two different schools and both schools attempted to cover up what turned out to be violent and unjustified assaults by staff.
At the time, we pulled the kids from these schools on medical leave and homeschooled while attempting to file civil rights complaints. But-- hello Kafka-- it turned out the DOE OCR lawyers were former colleagues and drinking buddies of one of the school's sleazy attack dog attorneys. I found it even more Kafkaesque that, when we confronted the school attorney an OCR lawyers about this glaring conflict, they seemed so assured of their own power and our powerlessness that they didn't even bother to conceal the conflict. This had pretty predictable results: though our cases were well documented, backed by medical reports of injuries and both our children could clearly describe the unwarranted attacks, OCR-- after treating us with sneering contempt for more than a month-- dropped both cases on a lame technicality.
It was a horrifying, hope-and-happiness-killing, crushing experience, especially discovering that there's really no reliable legal recourse against abuse of disabled students. No legal authority in the state would step in and even the ACLU refused to take the cases citing lack of expertise in special education. Even private attorneys who'd fought valiantly for church sex abuse victims refused to meet with us for the same reason and special education attorneys would not work on contingency because, as several confessed, there's simply no way to win. On learning that the cost of even trying to fight the schools would be six figures + and the children might be adults by the time any of it resolved, we thought the funds would be better spent on trauma therapy and educational resources while the kids were still actually kids.
Partly as a way to deal with my own trauma over these events, I got involved with the very few activist collectives attempting to address the issue of school abuse of the disabled. I was radicalized in the process, especially when I learned that, since the late 90's, an estimated 1 to 3 disabled individuals-- mostly children-- died every week in schools and institutions due to dangerous disciplinary practices like restraint and seclusion.
Because there's been no attempt to curb these practices in the intervening years since the last assessment, one can only imagine that the body count has grown in the last three decades. Yet there's still no official central database tracking these deaths so it's anyone's guess how many disabled children are being injured and killed every year since. According to the GAO, most of these deaths occur due to disabled children being uncooperative or "disruptive," not-- as the Association of School Administrators repeatedly claims in defense of restraint and seclusion practices-- due to children being a danger to themselves or others. What's worse, according to other research, regional coroners will often collude with schools in student death cases and, exactly like Nazi-era doctors whitewashing the murders of child victims of the T4 program, reportedly often list these restraint or seclusion deaths as "cardiac insufficiency."
Anyway, this is why I and others once thought classroom surveillance might be the answer. But the devil is in the details and, the more specifics I learned about the incremental privatization of schools, the more I understood that the treatment of disabled children isn't precisely accidental but, in fact, systemic. According to reports collected by Diane Ravitch, in the current "testocracy" (by which private scholastic testing corporations profit off the taxpayer teat), since staff merit pay in public schools depends on student test curves and since 90% of disabled students will predictably fail or bring down the curves of these tests, it strongly suggests that individual schools and individual educators are highly incentivized to shuffle disabled students off to private institutional "disability gulags" (where the injury and death counts are statistically far higher) and deny these students constitutionally guaranteed free and appropriate public education.
Actually killing students via brutal and unnecessary "disciplinary" practices may be unintentional "overkill" so to speak, but there appears to be a general momentum towards discouraging families from demanding inclusive public education that can have predictable deadly outcomes.
All told, cameras in classrooms started looking more and more like putting cameras on the Titanic., including the predictable outcome that those with the most to hide would do everything they could to make video evidence inaccessible in order to avoid consequences and bad PR. According to Wrightslaw, this is what mostly happens when schools adopt classroom video surveillance policies. Though schools that adopt these policies are often happy to use video evidence to feed the school-to-prison pipeline, the same evidence has a way of getting lost when it shows institutional abuse of student rights and safety. Or else schools successfully argue to block public access to the evidence based on-- irony of ironies-- the "privacy rights" of students.
Before this gets too depressing... long story short, we ultimately decided to leave the country and educate our kids in a more humane political environment with a bonus free public health system. The kids are now accomplished and generally healthy bilingual art and music students. We invite their teachers to holiday parties and have grown very close to several. Since we got here, we never even had an impulse to demand video surveillance of the kids' classrooms because our gut instincts as parents were never rattled to that degree.
I mention the above because I hope those analyzing related issues might understand there are some of very ugly "protection racket" dynamics that influence regular Joe Americans to accept or even seek extreme surveillance in schools. Understanding these "devilish details" might help those trying to counter and argue against these surveillance policies.
Thank you for this horrifying but important information. In some countries it is the law that classrooms for children must have clear glass windows so that lessons can be observed at any random time. I wonder if this system helps. I used to work with children in very deprived neighborhoods and the reports of abuses by teachers were rampant, especially of children with racial, linguistic, cognitive, or behavioral differences. I desperately wanted to institute these type of laws.
Thank you. All's well that ends well as they say and it's quite clear these experiences are part of why my kids are now such cheerful radicals and social justice mavens. But not all ends well for everyone. Dead kids don't grow up to be anything. Neither do a lot of repeatedly traumatized kids.
I have a friend and fellow "hyperactivist"-- without whom there would be no movement to outlaw things like face-down prone restraint and seclusion chambers in schools-- who remains a stubborn advocate for cameras in classrooms. and also believes charter schools are the answer. Though I'm no longer in the camera camp and was never a fan of charters, I can't harshly judge this individual because of the unimaginable loss her family endured. Her son, who was once only mildly disabled but, after years of being thrown on the floor and held down by school staff for the slightest infraction without his family's knowledge or consent, no longer leaves his room, barely speaks and has aged out of services. The only remedy offered was major sedatives which ended up causing disabling tardive dyskinesia. The drugs were quickly discontinued but the movement disorder is permanent and seems to have snowballed-- as it statistically does more often than med-pushers admit-- into early dementia.
About ten years ago and right after their own ordeals, my kids met this young man and still feel survivor guilt towards him because it was his mother's monumental, single-handed data collection, awareness-raising and warnings that saved their necks. The only reason I was able to overcome my paralyzing shock and act quickly to remove my children from dangerous schools was because of her work. Her son died while still breathing so others could be spared.
I feel like an idiot that I ever once lobbied for surveillance technology as a remedy to protect disabled children. But I think we're all being frog-boiled into moving deck chairs (or installing cameras or observation windows) on the Titanic rather than recognizing that the whole ship is sinking by design. As Ravitch paints it, the privatization of public education is following the same "defund, defame and privatize" pattern as the liberalization of everything else like water, prisons, policing, postal services, etc.
In short, from a certain angle, staff abuse of students arguably hastens privatization so there's little incentive to change the organizational dynamics which increase risk of abuse. The same year my tiny, nonviolent, loving marshmallow son (because he reached out and gently pulled a twig from a female student's long hair-- a memory that still makes me weep in despair because he was pre-branded and preemptively punished as some kind of deadly Lennie from Mice and Men due to his disability) was physically dragged out of a classroom and shoved into a seclusion chamber that doubled as a janitor's supply closet, a film came out titled Won't Back Down. The film presented charter schools as the salvation and remedy for this precise type of abuse. I nearly puked when I saw the trailer because I recognized the same old neoliberal protection racket message. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a7SLGSmAsw
But, because childhood and the window to educate children is so brief, most parents-- in particular those who can't afford to homeschool or or leave the country or send children to groovy alternative schools (or whose children aren't eligible because Montessori and Waldorf largely reject disabled kids)-- are hostages.. So sometimes we move chairs around and call for more surveillance and, like most embattled and stressed and distracted people, may miss the frying-pan-to-fire danger of doing these things.
I'm sure the remaining educators with souls are suffering similar confusion-- if they haven't yet fled the profession due to PTSD. When I started pitching in to support special ed advocacy attorneys lobbying to ban certain dangerous restraint practices, I met quite a few former teachers who'd had to quit due to trauma.
As a side note, I think it's important to point out that neoliberal policies aren't the sole cause of brutality in education. Part of it is just that humans kind of suck if not regulated and given oversight. In researching issues related to abuse by school staff, I learned something very interesting. Though the education apparatus would love to pretend that corporal punishment of students in public schools has been banned in most regions due to the abiding humanity of modern educators and maybe teleological "human progress," history tells a much different story. It seems that, back in the day when schoolmasters would regularly thrash misbehaving students, it wasn't unheard of that outraged family members in the US might hunt down the thrashers and either assault or shoot them.
Just to be clear, I'm not condoning vigilantism. But I would like to give an early warning to anyone interested in why school surveillance and data-mining are gaining a foothold among the public. The real nitty gritty info lies in how disabled students are treated, not only economically disadvantaged and minority students. This is especially true because the primary victims of deadly school abuse are disadvantage minority students with disabilities. I would encourage anyone seeking to correct the current trajectory to embed themselves down among disability families-- particularly those of minority and economically disadvantaged status-- to learn of the truly staggering horrors that may be driving
the public into neoliberal protection racket traps.
I never felt the need to have children, but if I had, I could no longer have them in this country. My advice to any young parent would be to keep a baby off the grid. No SS#, no formal ID. Keep them off the web, and find ways to make that work, because once you’re in that maelstrom, there’s no getting out. This interview shows that there’s no one too young to be harvested by the corrupt and immoral state. Is this a conspiracy theory? You bet it is.
A thousand thanks for this supremely important information. And thanks also for scouring the world for injustice. It would be the work of a lifetime just to write about Gaza, and those heartbreaks. That you find time to address so many other issues is appreciated.
“they're just going through mental health challenges, which is a part of life for some folks.”
Students “need to feel comfortable to be able to make . . . mistakes.”
Actually, “mental health challenges” are “a part of life” for all “folks,” all day long every day . Therefore we all need to feel comfortable, all day long, every day, about making mistakes. And therefore we all have all sorts of things to hide, because we must laboriously process the vast, teeming confusion that is our minds in order to produce the behavior of a civilized adult. That the human mind is a vast, teeming confusion is obvious both from ordinary experience to anyone with an interior life, and from a slight acquaintance with any kind of psychodynamic psychology. “I have nothing to hide” is the motto of someone who has internalized his identity as an object of totalitarian control. This motto is another version of “I love Big Brother.”
The surveillance described in this interview is part of the creeping totalitarianism of modern American culture. The election of Trump is merely a single, spectacular symptom of this disease. In order to understand our creeping totalitarianism, it is necessary to look beyond its manifestations on the behavioral level, whether in educational institutions, electoral politics, or elsewhere. It is necessary to look to its foundation, which is in the human mind.
In this regard, it is illuminating to consider in particular the nature of the development of the superego (the conscience). A child learns “the difference between right and wrong.” This is the necessary beginning of the development of the superego; but on this level the superego is still crude and immature. A great many people never progress beyond this level. On the lowest range of this level are psychopaths, who have little or no conscience. But most people who never develop above this level are those people who have conformist or authoritarian personalities. They act mostly mindlessly and mechanically, on the basis of a simplistic, literal-minded, fundamentalist conscience. We have been discovering to our horror that such people constitute large subcultures in our society.
A considerable number of people progress above this level, to develop a more highly-informed and flexible conscience. They are consequently able to adapt conscientiously and creatively to the multifarious and unpredictable vicissitudes of life. The people who progress to this level constitute the general multitude of a reasonably civilized society.
But as the bloody smear that is history shows, the conscience of the general multitude of people who make up a reasonably civilized society is still not a fully-developed conscience. To become a fully developed individual, one must develop a fully individualized conscience. That is one reason why, for example, we read Chris Hedges, who always challenges and informs our conscience (even if we don’t always agree with him). But experience shows plainly that society does not want people to develop this higher level of individuality and conscience. Society, even a reasonably civilized one, does not want its members to become fully-developed, unpredictable individuals with minds of their own. It wants them to be conformists whom it can control. Consequently, in order to fully develop one’s individuality, one must develop a private and individual superego, or conscience—a conscience of which society knows nothing, and of which few others (except, often, one’s partner) know very much. Nor is it only people who have developed to a high level of individuality who need to have a private conscience of which society knows nothing. Almost everyone is capable of acting on the most highly-developed level of conscience on some occasions, or in some aspects of life. This part of almost all of us is humanity’s saving remnant. Therefore it is this innermost part of us, hidden far away even from its expressions in educational, political, or other outward aspects of our lives, that society seeks to eradicate. The Benthamite panoptical prison in which contemporary society is incarcerating us with computer technology, all day long, every day, will be incomparably more total than any previous totalitarianism.
We must attack the branches that grow from the poison tree of surveillance, several of which are informatively and admirably described in this interview. But these branches will simply grow back more luxuriant than before unless we attack their root, which is society's incomprehension of the fact that there is nothing that is real or meaningful except in relation to the life of an individual human being. All true education is a process that takes place in the mind of the individual. All true teaching is an act of one human mind helping another human mind to think for itself--in the Buddhist figure, like a spark in a forest fire leaping from one tree to another and setting it on fire. Consequently, to use computer technology to mechanically intervene between the mind of a teacher and a student, and therefore to obstruct true teaching, is intrinsically evil. Take the first step through that gate, and you’re already lost. It is not something that can be reformed.
Benedict Anderson shows in “Imagined Communities” how the newly-refined census was used by colonial powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create identities for counting and classifying the “natives”—identities that did not actually exist except as abstract, arbitrary, and contrived census-categories created in the fantasy-worlds of the colonizers. Through a complex chain of events, these “identities” eventually became reified in real people, in ways of course that benefitted their colonial masters. In our time, just as forcing people into colonially-invented census-categories of identity had negated their true identities as individuals, using computer technology to help educate people who did not ask for such help is to negate and destroy education in the name of education. The only true education is helping people to learn to think for themselves. The computerization of education is a device for reifying totalitarian fantasies of human identities, in the form of living human beings in their formative years, so they can better serve their masters.
It's very disturbing knowing that children's brains are being wired to know that everything they do online is being monitored and tracked and have to accept it.
“What Orwell failed to predict is that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.”
- Comic Keith Lowell Jensen
Do you think Orwell didn't know that the masses would go along with the propaganda? I would think Orwell would fear that we are all watched, AI and govt., with means to silence and arrest, including for thought crimes. And now, the young are indoctrinated into this as normal. Older people too, but we know of a different way of life.
Remember when everyone hankered after their fifteen minutes of fame? Now the unattainable holy grail is privacy. Those who can afford it will pay large fees to online scrubbing services to wipe all their personal info off the web.
If only ALL parents were aware. The idea of ANYONE having 24/7 access to your child's online presence at all, is actually horrifying.