CCTV in class spies on teachers, says union – Telegraph: Schools are becoming “Orwellian” societies where CCTV cameras in classrooms monitor pupil behaviour.
Yep, get them while they’re young, molding them into a submissive and compliant society.
They are relying on “Big Brother-style” tactics to crack down on assaults on staff and fellow children, it is claimed.
Many of the Government’s semi-independent academies have installed cameras and two-way mirrors to let senior staff monitor pupils, they say.
But the 160,000-strong Association of Teachers and Lecturers fears that the systems are being used by heads to monitor staff performance, putting teachers’ ability to work independently at risk.
After all these years of ever expanding monitoring, does something like this seem a surprise? Keeping the kids under surveillance is fine just as long as the teachers are not being watched.
Well, I read the article and this post so far===so whats wrong with this Orwellian Monitoring other than people being held responsible for what they do/don’t do?
Please be specific.
Not so very long ago in the 20th century we monitored pretty much everything kids did.
I know my mother enlisted a huge network of people that saw me here or saw me do that and then reported it. My mother would then bait me with the question where had I been. To which she knew all the answers.
This was during an era when you could have such monitoring.
Now if we go back a wee bit farther to the early 20th and late 19th century. The industrial revolution was in full swing in the UK and US. The gap between the haves and have-nots was vast and many low and middle income families had BOTH parents working. Kids ran amuck. Little or no supervision and worse; still many became orphans due to factory accidents.
The situation was so bad at some points that it became common place for stories to be written about truant children and the hard and deadly lives these kids lived. (Some were painted wistfully and gave rise to one reelers like The Little Rascals)
Does any of that sound familiar? Yep it does. History often repeats itself because people refuse to learn from it.
Now we are back to kids running amuck. Parents unable or unwilling to cope with monitoring their kids. So we turn to tech to be a nanny.
Not a great idea, but it’s what people want as they don’t want to give up their lifestyle.
So really we haven’t changed, we just have another method. Will it work? Doubtful for prevention, but yes for retribution.
So here is the game. If people do not want to be monitored 24/7, please take the time to become the final arbiter in your lives, take responsibility for yourself and your kids and step up and do what needs to be done.
Then the nanny state won’t have to blow your tax money on harebrained schemes that only show you what happens AFTER the place blows up.
Cursor_
#3–cursor==retribution is the first step in prevention. Film the kid bringing cigarettes to school and confiscate them and give him counselling==he doesn’t bring cigarettes to school.
Same for bullying.
Same for teachers making out in the hallway while class is going on.
All kinds of opportunity for corrections/prevention to be made.
All that the teachers need to do is learn how to fake looking busy while they are daydreaming.
A better question …
What is with the UK and monitoring it’s citizens?
It sounds like China over there with cameras all over the place.
Really, it sounds like something that the Soviet Union and East Germany would have dreamed of having.
Maybe James Bond didn’t realize that he was an agent for a country that would do the same thing as the commies when he was on all the spy missions 😉
#5–HMyers==I’m no expert, but as a casual viewer of the news, seems to me there were a lot of IRA bombing in London a few years back and in order to prevent and find the perpetrators, surveillence cameras were installed. It was found that they work quite well in fighting crime.
So each society gets a choice about this technology==crime fighting versus invasion of anonymity.
I would prefer more effective crime fighting and deterence. Others prefer the risk of harm in order to do whatever they think is so worthy of privacy.
Lets hook this to the children. Help prevent kidnapping or finding the perp, or don’t do it as it films the kiddies picking their noses? Which is better?
How many people are hired to observe all these camera feeds?
#6 – crime fighting versus invasion of anonymity.
You spelled privacy wrong.
If they are going to have them they might as well use them.
I say this because just last week a 16 year old boy was jumped from the back while walking down the school hallway at a local school. He defended himself by getting loose and throwing one swing that ended the fight after the attacker hit him three times.
It’s all there on tape. In any court in the land it would have been enough to convict the attacker. The attacker was suspended for 10 day. Good so far. The kid that defended himself was suspended for five days.
the alternative is electroshock therapy for all..