Adolescents require a sense of privacy in order to properly grow into functional and successful adults. I was under constant surveillance as a child and wasn't able to start "being me" until I'd left home. My development was straight up stunted by constant surveillance. There are too many abusive / helicopter parents out there for this to possibly be a good thing.

I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me.

And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.

Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.

>And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.

Yes, but the powers that be don't actually want that. It's easier to control children that don't know better if they're prevented from learning that things could be better, much like it's antithetical to a racist government's power to educate people of races they don't like.

This is appealing to technocrats and other authoritarians, because They know better than You, but that's short-term thinking at its worst; what they fail to consider or calculate is that progress requires time and risk to occur.

I grew up free range. And I mean like, "going to the woods for a couple days, very back Sunday..." type free.

Was not able to do that degree with my own kids, but they had considerably more than their peers did. (Yes, I had to deal with helicopter parents a few times)

I'm fortunate to have enjoyed similar freedoms; my guardians would throw me out the door until night time and on weekends I would disappear without communication. Luckily the only thing they enjoyed more than controlling every aspect of my personality was pretending I didn't exist.

It was weird spending time with friends whose parents generally let them develop their own personalities and interests unhindered but who would have to check in or get permission every time we changed locations. Once I was out the house, I never felt the need to check in because neither did my guardians. Honestly I'm fairly certain they would hope I wouldn't come back one day. And I definitely had quite a few close calls.

As for my own children, I plan to do the same; their time is their business, as long as they stay out of trouble. Hopefully while at home I manage to drill some sense into their heads.

I am doing a repeat with my granddaughter. We are likely to raise her. (Son has really fallen)

Just cannot see her suffering through the mess.

In both directions.

The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value.

Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.

I'm curious why in such an environment even if tapes existed you believe that students and parents would have any access to such tapes even if authorities within the school reviewed such and knew what you were saying to be absolutely true.

I'm curious, did you attend a large(ish) school or a smaller school?

I attended what most people would consider a "small" public high school in the U.S. (rural area, less than 1,000 students, one high school for the entire county), and never experienced anything like what you're describing.

Teachers knew students by name (given the smaller size of their classes; for example, there was one band teacher for the entire school), as well as students' parents by name.

The schools that I went to had around 300 students. It did not stop the abuse by teachers nor did it stop the bullying that the teachers ignored.

I never experienced or observed bad bullying or even physical violence (except for some minor skirmishes, usually between friends) during my school years.

We surely had our share of social awkward people, but they were left alone unless they themselves acted out, and they usually still made some friends.

We didn't have true bullies. Maybe occasionally somebody from a higher grade would tease somebody younger, but never for long let alone repeatedly. Beating somebody up would have been a great crime worthy of grave penalties in our eyes, and we would have stopped it and then have ratted out whoever it was in a heartbeat. If somebody tried to bully somebody beyond what we considered acceptable teasing or be aggessive to somebody, the class mates would protect whoever it was, even the social awkward kid. This only happened once in my peer group with a dude who had freshly transferred from another school (moved cities IIRC) trying to be the "cool" guy picking on an awkward kid, starting to slap him. He quickly learned that if you want to bully or fight one of us, you will fight all of us. Forming a crowd around him telling him to leave his victim alone, fuck off and never try it again with anybody was enough. A few years later we were buddies with him.

There were some students who gave teachers a somewhat hard time, but mostly "class jokers" who probably suffered from ADHD. I only ever had one class mate who posed such a problem the teachers could not handle her within our school. She was then sent off to a special care place specializing in teens with her kinds of problems, not as a punishment or some bullshit "zero tolerance" policy but to help her.

This is of course just my personal experience in the two schools I personally visited, but it makes me genuinely wonder how the dynamics in a school can change and deteriorate to a point where constant bullying and even beat ups are tolerated and common (whether it be due to obliviousness or fear). But I know it happens, and happens a lot.

I went to a small elementary school; a small-ish middle school, and a large "talented" high school. The last was by far the best environment. The first two were in the suburbs; the last in a major city.

The middle school was the worst of the bunch, but the unhealthy power dynamics are everywhere. Students who, if they don't care for their grades, teachers have zero leverage over. Teachers with little to no accountability, and a bunch of hormone-rich assholes to look after. All locked in together day after day.

It was atrocious.

> Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people.

*In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.

It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible.

After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well.

Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...

> Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood

When I studied abroad in Europe, other exchange students regularly asked me how us Americans learn anything when we are constantly talking during class as seen in any highschool teen drama movie. As if Mean Girls was a documentary. I was dumbfounded.

People assume art imitates life. That, aside from a few liberties taken to make a more interesting story, movies try to faithfully represent reality. And when so many movies all share the same spin, one assumes there's some truth behind that spin.

A big part of what people think about daily US life, past and present, is shaped by movies. E.g. we didn't learn about Mt. Rushmore, Drive-In theaters, the FBI, Thanksgiving, or Miranda rights in school.

Why would you expect a movie to show all the class lectures that are totally irrelevant to the plot? One lecture would be half the length of a movie.

I wouldn't - that would be one of the "few liberties taken to make a more interesting story" I mentioned.

*Everywhere. My own school experience in Europe was pretty much the same as he described. And it is not only my school experience either, there were many cases of unpunished power abuse that the teachers engaged in in nearby schools.

ESL teacher here. I agree with your comment (although not necessarily with the reasoning).

This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office.

They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this.

Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms.

Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time.

A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached.

I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course.

I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!

I side with the teachers on this one. Parents should not be able to watch their kids' classroom in realtime. There are helicopter parents out there, now they will be helicoptering the poor teachers and other students.

I think surveillance should still be used but with limitation, similar to police bodycams. Have audio/video recording and provide it to the parents if an incident arises or if there is a reasonable request from a parent. This introduces subjectivity but if carefully implemented that could be minimized.

I am concerned that desensitizing the future generations to constant surveillance could have bad consequences down the line, when people suddenly become ok with living in a 1984 type environment because that's all they know through their formative/school years.

But yeah some kind of unobtrusive bodycam style system for forensic purposes only (no access for parents) seems a reasonable middle ground.

Whilst I support the premise that schools might want security cameras for security reasons (finding out who beat someone up etc), it’s basically been shown that schools can’t be trusted with that kind of technology. I imagine that it would have a huge chilling effect on student development if everything was constantly being monitored (and who knows who watches the tapes).

Adding technology to a social problem isn't going to fix it.

I disagree with the surveillance bit, but yes parents can be pretty ignorant of their kid's behaviour outside of home.

As a former student I do not.

There is a huge difference between what is described in the article, and a simple video recording that you're describing.

A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.

Gosh,do you think there could be a bug where black males are evaluated as "more aggressive" than white females, by the AI system? Surely it would be calibrated against that, perhaps by using police officer's professional judgment as training labels...

OMG lol i was going to agree with you with all the recent tragedies lately and then you had to drop because of student behavior. well i have seen teachers take it out on students too...

It's really quite simple - with great power comes great responsibility.

And teacher behavior!