Under the guise of “security,” government schools are squandering millions of taxpayer dollars to become even more like prisons. Aside from the high walls, the metal detectors and the statist ethos that permeates them already, “public” education officials across multiple states now working to have facial-recognition cameras put in, too.
According to a report in Gizmodo, schools all over the country are now splurging on “security” gear that was once reserved for international airports and high-security prisons. Aside from the facial-recognition systems that could identify everybody who passes by, public schools are buying “object recognition” systems to detect weapons, and even license-plate tracking technology.
Apparently, the software and “machine-learning algorithms” that go with all the new gear will even be able to detect “behavior” that might pose a “safety threat.” “It is cutting edge,” boasted Technology Director Robert LiPuma with a New York school district about spending almost $4 million of a “state grant” on “high-tech security” for local schools. “We’re hoping to be a model.”
Of course, the left-wing media fretted about concerns about “race,” “fairness,” and “gender.” But outside of the kooky world of “social-justice warriors” where everything is somehow about race and class and gender, there are plenty of legitimate concerns about this kind of surveillance technology being deployed against children in schools.
For one, there are major privacy issues. Who will have access to the data? What will it be used for? Could pedophiles use it to stalk or spy on children? Could the data be added to the federal dossiers being compiled on Americans citizens by a dizzying array of bureaucracies? Could it be combined with other data being vacuumed up by the schools? Will the government incorporate it into decision-making that affects citizens’ lives?
Obviously, the questions are troubling — and based on what is known already, the answers are even more troubling.
Consider, too, some of the other technology being deployed at government schools to spy on children. For instance, the federal government boasted about funding the use of a “facial expression camera” used to “detect emotion” and “capture facial expressions.” The feds are also funding the creation of data-gathering robots to compile even more information on children, including “mental health” data. In some cases, schools have even been spying on children at home via their government-issued technology.
All of this data is then being stored in federal databases. And the feds are openly bragging about it! “A student learning database stores time-stamped student input and behaviors captured as students work within the system,” boasted a U.S. Department of Education report. The same document celebrates the “predictive model” that “combines demographic data and learning/behavior data from the student learning database to track a student’s progress and make predictions about his or her future behaviors or performance.”
At the rate government schools are going, they will soon become “panopticon”-style prisons in which every move and every facial expression of every child will be vacuumed up, stored, and analyzed by the nation’s would-be federal overlords and their computer systems. It does not take much imagination to recognize the incredible danger inherent in these developments.
All the facial-recognition cameras and data-mining in the world will not be able to prevent the unfolding disasters taking place across America’s government-run indoctrination centers: school shootings, drug use, abortions, promiscuity, suicide, ubiquitous ignorance, and evil run amok.
Teaching children truth and biblical morality — and how to think — would stop the accelerating societal collapse in its tracks. But unfortunately that will not happen anytime soon, as the government “education” system is doing exactly what the establishment wants it to be doing.