Almost every day I read any number of stories, many of them alarmist but a few genuinely disturbing, about the loss of privacy in the Internet age. The press loves nothing more than to regale readers with horror stories about just how much marketers and businesses know about them, along with the nefarious purposes such information could be used for. Meanwhile, the fact that many U.S. schools are telling children that they should have no privacy and, in fact, should willingly surrender their privacy to the state to increase their safety, goes largely unnoticed or, when it is highlighted, as in a September 5, 2000 USA Today article, such efforts are actually lauded.
The small item buried on page 10B of the USA Today proclaims that “School bags clear up for safe kids.” This is a small blurb praising manufacturers, retail stores, and public schools for making, selling, and requiring clear, see-through backpacks. According to the USA Today story, “Clear plastic backpacks, gym bags and even notebooks are becoming part of crime prevention by school officials.”
Some schools across the country are requiring all students to wear clear backpacks. A spokesman for South Houston High School in Texas, for example, told USA Today that it started requiring clear backpacks two years ago because “we felt like requiring transparent backpacks would make it more difficult to bring a weapon on the school grounds.”
Along with guns and knives, USA Today notes that “school officials hope clear products will also discourage other distractions such as Pokemon cards, computer games, water guns and portable music players.” Gotta catch ’em all!
Such requirements are an abomination and I would never send my daughter to a school that required her to wear a clear backpack, anymore than I would agree to work for a company that required me to carry a clear briefcase. The schools that do are sending a clear message to students — individual rights must always be subsumed to the goals and demands of the state, and only criminals and evildoers would want to conceal anything from state officials.
Ann Beeson, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, gets it right on the money when she tells USA Today that “to suspect every student to the extent that each is required to carry a clear backpack, then we’ve created prisons.” In fact public educators often seem to treat their wards as little more than prisoners who have no rights to resist even the most absurd requests (the number of news stories about illegal strip searches in public schools is a good example of this attitude).
Public schools, of all places, should teach children the most fundamental principle behind American democracy: that the only reason for the existence of the state is to serve individuals and, as such, the powers of the state are limited by an individual’s unalienable rights. Instead, they train children to subsume all of their rights and interests to the needs of the state. That’s one lesson children don’t need.
Source:
School bags clear up for safe kids. Lorrie Grant, USA Today, September 5, 2000.