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We say this, but then we also bring the hammer down if admin's not watching and something bad happens—say, if bullying were happening in the school-provided cha

We say this, but then we also bring the hammer down if admin's not watching and something bad happens—say, if bullying were happening in the school-provided chat this was monitoring, or a kid wrote something about shooting up the school, or drug deals are being made in the chat, or whatever, and then a kid commits suicide, or a fight happens and it comes out that it was because of bullying in chat, or a kid does in fact shoot someone at school, or a kid ODs. Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued. Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations. > With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there. I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.

livueta 4y ago
Yeah, I wish I could agree with the grandparent, but "child safety" is a very effective cheat code for bypassing reasoning because the harms (dead kid!) are immediate, concrete and visceral, while the benefits of not are way more abstract. How do you even begin to quantify the psychological impact of total surveillance? In such a liability-centric culture, it's easy to see why the cards fall as they do. I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not. While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  It's yet another example of locally rational and globally irrational. 100 years ago you would have 5-10 kids and if one or two died, such is life. Today most families are 1-2 kids - the level of investment and risk is much more concentrated. It may be bad for kids generally, but each parent is (in a way) making a rational choice for their individual kid.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    People had that many children here in NL because of religious influence (= more souls for the church) and because they would lose one or two of them, almost guaranteed. It wasn't a matter of 'if'. Reduced influence of the church + much better medical understanding and vaccination for a lot of the infant killers as well as increased affluence has caused people to start having children later which already cuts off a whole chunk of offspring and fewer.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    100 years ago was also around the two World Wars, and losing all of your 5-10 kids would widely happen. It wasn’t just kids, people dying was just part of life.
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_brothers
_aavaa_ 4y ago
This is a false dichotomy though. The two options aren’t “school never hears about bad things happening through school computer/software” and “school must monitor everything”. Some simple changes just off the top of my head: - the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to. - the school then acts on the information provided to them. It’s not reasonable for parents or others to expect the school to stop anything hateful from ever happening. But it is reasonable to expect them to do something about it after it’s been brought to their attention.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Not all the bad things will get reported. Many won't involve any participants who'd care to report them. The school will suffer regardless, if it comes out that they missed something and a bad thing happened that was connected to it (not even necessarily if it was caused by it). "But they'll just do this on other forms of chat that the school can't monitor!" Yes, they will, but the school won't face multimillion dollar lawsuits over that.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    I don’t know what the laws are where you are, but I believe that they should include the right to privacy for the students. They have a right to not live in a panopticon for 12+ years of their life because they might do something bad. I also imagine that one lawsuit like this will set a precedent, and then there will either be multi-million dollar settlements, or people will decide that children should not be placed in a panopticon. But either way, this counter argument is based on the implicit assumption that the school should be providing an “official” system through which the students should talk to each other. Get rid of that, and problem solved. Have an official channel for parent-student, parent-teacher. And let the students talk amongst themselves the way they wish.
- luckylion 4y ago
jacquesm 4y ago
That sounds good, in principle. But in practice bullying is rampant, as is drug dealing (even in 'good' schools). School shootings we have extremely rarely here, rounded down to zero. And the tracking is done just the same but it isn't used in a pre-emptive way at all, at best after the fact and even then the company that installed and maintains the systems probably has more access than the school administrators (which they can fairly easily abuse) and the people who built the software and/or host it likely have even more. The high school two of my sons go to has all kinds of crap that they have install on their mandatory smartphone. If you don't do it then so sorry, no school for you. Which is pretty weird because the law here says that children should be given an education, it doesn't specify anything about the mandatory use of all kinds of tech for which perfectly good paper equivalents exist. All I see as the end result of this is utter unaccountability, zero effect on the things it supposedly is for and finally if the tools are used at all it is to the schools advantage (and the pupils and parents' disadvantage), such as ad-hoc reschedulings. I'd love for my kids to have paper agendas and just their books for high school, this phone+laptop combo just adds to the weight they already have to lug around (which is insanse, if my travel bag were that heavy I'd never travel), is super fragile, expensive and best of all forcefully ties them into the Microsoft applications + eco system, something they really can do without.
LeonB 4y ago
After the bad thing happens — we look back and find that incidents occurred that were not handled. Eg they were bullying or bullied and complaints about the bullying were raised but were not dealt with. Preemptive monitoring not required. Or we find “concerns were raised” about behaviour, often many times, over many years, and the concerns were ignored. Anyone translating such things into a need for more pervasive monitoring is just pushing their own agenda.

livueta 4y ago

Yeah, I wish I could agree with the grandparent, but "child safety" is a very effective cheat code for bypassing reasoning because the harms (dead kid!) are immediate, concrete and visceral, while the benefits of not are way more abstract. How do you even begin to quantify the psychological impact of total surveillance? In such a liability-centric culture, it's easy to see why the cards fall as they do. I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not. While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.

arrosenberg 4y ago
It's yet another example of locally rational and globally irrational. 100 years ago you would have 5-10 kids and if one or two died, such is life. Today most families are 1-2 kids - the level of investment and risk is much more concentrated. It may be bad for kids generally, but each parent is (in a way) making a rational choice for their individual kid.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  People had that many children here in NL because of religious influence (= more souls for the church) and because they would lose one or two of them, almost guaranteed. It wasn't a matter of 'if'. Reduced influence of the church + much better medical understanding and vaccination for a lot of the infant killers as well as increased affluence has caused people to start having children later which already cuts off a whole chunk of offspring and fewer.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  100 years ago was also around the two World Wars, and losing all of your 5-10 kids would widely happen. It wasn’t just kids, people dying was just part of life.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_brothers

_aavaa_ 4y ago

This is a false dichotomy though. The two options aren’t “school never hears about bad things happening through school computer/software” and “school must monitor everything”. Some simple changes just off the top of my head: - the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to. - the school then acts on the information provided to them. It’s not reasonable for parents or others to expect the school to stop anything hateful from ever happening. But it is reasonable to expect them to do something about it after it’s been brought to their attention.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Not all the bad things will get reported. Many won't involve any participants who'd care to report them. The school will suffer regardless, if it comes out that they missed something and a bad thing happened that was connected to it (not even necessarily if it was caused by it). "But they'll just do this on other forms of chat that the school can't monitor!" Yes, they will, but the school won't face multimillion dollar lawsuits over that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  I don’t know what the laws are where you are, but I believe that they should include the right to privacy for the students. They have a right to not live in a panopticon for 12+ years of their life because they might do something bad. I also imagine that one lawsuit like this will set a precedent, and then there will either be multi-million dollar settlements, or people will decide that children should not be placed in a panopticon. But either way, this counter argument is based on the implicit assumption that the school should be providing an “official” system through which the students should talk to each other. Get rid of that, and problem solved. Have an official channel for parent-student, parent-teacher. And let the students talk amongst themselves the way they wish.
luckylion 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

That sounds good, in principle. But in practice bullying is rampant, as is drug dealing (even in 'good' schools). School shootings we have extremely rarely here, rounded down to zero. And the tracking is done just the same but it isn't used in a pre-emptive way at all, at best after the fact and even then the company that installed and maintains the systems probably has more access than the school administrators (which they can fairly easily abuse) and the people who built the software and/or host it likely have even more. The high school two of my sons go to has all kinds of crap that they have install on their mandatory smartphone. If you don't do it then so sorry, no school for you. Which is pretty weird because the law here says that children should be given an education, it doesn't specify anything about the mandatory use of all kinds of tech for which perfectly good paper equivalents exist. All I see as the end result of this is utter unaccountability, zero effect on the things it supposedly is for and finally if the tools are used at all it is to the schools advantage (and the pupils and parents' disadvantage), such as ad-hoc reschedulings. I'd love for my kids to have paper agendas and just their books for high school, this phone+laptop combo just adds to the weight they already have to lug around (which is insanse, if my travel bag were that heavy I'd never travel), is super fragile, expensive and best of all forcefully ties them into the Microsoft applications + eco system, something they really can do without.

LeonB 4y ago

After the bad thing happens — we look back and find that incidents occurred that were not handled. Eg they were bullying or bullied and complaints about the bullying were raised but were not dealt with. Preemptive monitoring not required. Or we find “concerns were raised” about behaviour, often many times, over many years, and the concerns were ignored. Anyone translating such things into a need for more pervasive monitoring is just pushing their own agenda.