Earlier this morning, Gardner Campbell retweeted a thought-provoking comment from Tony Gonzalez referring to a boingboing article about the electronic panopticon that many of our public schools have become. I agree wholeheartedly with Gardner and Tony that I wouldn’t dream of subjecting my own kid to that kind of environment.
Leaving aside the two-tiered system that results when Gardner, Tony, and I (and others like us) opt out of the public system for our children, what worries me is the longer-term pernicious effect on American society that such a system of schools is having. We’ve already seen tremendous erosions in personal liberty and privacy rights over the past 3 or 4 decades as a result of the war on drugs and the war on terror. Thanks to the exclusionary rule, the 4th amendment has been shot so full of exceptions that it’s hardly recognizable, and there have even been calls to eliminate the exclusionary rule, the only enforcement we have for the 4th amendment. The exclusionary rule is bad, but without it, we have no remedy for violations of 4th amendment rights, and a right without a remedy is no right at all.
And therein is the problem with raising generations of children in prison-like schools: the protections of the 4th-amendment are based on the concept of a reasonable expectation of privacy. What happens to those rights when we raise a few generations to accept warrantless searches, metal detectors, suspicionless canine searches, drug testing, constant webcam surveillance, and biometric-scanning to get into an amusement park as normal parts of life? If most people don’t expect to have any privacy, none of us will have any right to privacy.
That’s not a world I want to have a hand in creating.
Tags: constitution, education, Fourth Amendment, school