America’s Schools: Breeding Grounds for Compliant Citizens
October 15, 2012
By John W. Whitehead
“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language
of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation
of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students
are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their
capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them
into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and
convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better
off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being
valued members of the public schools.”—Professor Henry Giroux
For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this
dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy
and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security,
expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public
schools.
Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of
freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are
becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens. The
moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves
under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted,
scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on. Between metal detectors at the
entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras
in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more
like prisons than learning facilities.
Add to this the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them
as if they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a
perfect citizenry for our emerging police state—one that can be easily
cowed, controlled, and directed. Now comes the latest development in the
sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification cards
containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that allow school
officials to track every step students take. So small that they are
barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by
which the wearer’s precise movements can be constantly monitored.
A pilot program using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools
in San Antonio, Texas’ Northside School District. In the so-called name
of school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones
Middle School are being required to carry these “smart” ID cards
embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a
signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290
surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school
officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times.
School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112
schools, with a student population of 100,000. As always, there’s a
money incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, it’s
increased state funding for the school system. Although implementation
of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that
if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the
students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million
from the state government.
High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the
RFID cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal to
wear an ID card.”
Students who refuse to take part in the ID program
won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and
library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular
activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and
Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her
old ID card. According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring
students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. School
officials reportedly offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from
Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID, stop
criticizing the program and publicly support the initiative. Hernandez
refused the offer.
This is not the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on
unsuspecting students and their parents. Schools in California and
Connecticut have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using
RFID chips to track students as early as 2004. With the RFID business
booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID
Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school
districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security
and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based
company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve
percent.
RFID tags are not the only surveillance tools being used on America’s
young people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif.,
have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David Rosen
explains:
Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’
phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In
addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks
their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school,
at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8pm. These students are also
assigned an adult ‘coach’ who calls them at least three times a week to
see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure
they get to school.
Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese
and overweight students with wristwatches that record their heart rate,
movement and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their
lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits
of students. Schools in Michigan’s second largest school district
broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the
hallways in real time to let students know they’re being watched.
Some school districts have even gone so far as to electronically track
students without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a
Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with
software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at
home. This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which
resulted in the school district settling with irate students and
parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee middle school
placed cameras in the school’s locker rooms, capturing images of
children changing before basketball practice.
Thankfully, the US Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the practice in 2008, ruling that
students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.
Clearly, there’s something more sinister afoot than merely tracking
which students are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break.
Concerned parent Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not
want our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even
acceptable or mandatory,” she shared.
“Conditioned” is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized in their book, Work Redesign,
laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized adults “are
necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they
most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with
relative ease.” Taking those ideas one step further, psychologist Bruce
Levine noted, “Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which
achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the
same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all
seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable
objects.”
To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for
compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient
and expendable, it is only because that’s what they’ve been taught in
the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations who run the
show.
More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from
cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to
nursing homes. In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of
pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and
technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and
unwilling to challenge the status quo. All the while, in the name of the
greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the
government strips away our rights one by one—monitoring our
conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our
possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the
burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.
Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously
attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same
nevertheless for young and old alike.
WC: 1376
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