Re:1984 (Score 1)

I work at a school and I have to say that the tension between safety and virtually everything else almost always points toward safety. My Media Center has 60 some computers that we offer to students to use after school until 4. There are lots of reasons to have it open, the main one in my mind is to provide access for kids that don't have computers at home. Our safety committee decided that because of concerns that they wanted to close the school at 3 and stop the late bus and send everyone home. Would it help me to know where everyone is during the day? Absolutely. Will it help to identify students? Absolutely. This Having been in uncomfortable positions in a school and having faced the threat of the lawsuit and the inevitable bad press and negative repercussions, I completely understand the need to keep total track of our students. As a matter of fact, it is a legal responsibility of a school--mind you a legal responsibility which no school does a perfect job at. So the tension to be 100% information aware of our students is a very attractive offer. The other advantage would be to be able to identify students. I can't count the number of times I have been lied to about a student's identity in a school with over 2200 students. I simply can't know all of the kids. Does that sound like Ingsoc? I hate to say it does. The truth is the Big Brother metaphor isn't perfect, but I do understand why people tend to want to go to great lengths to keep up. Ultimately, I doubt it would be effective because of the fundamental educational law: "Student effort to scale a wall is directly proportional to the size of the wall and the interesting stuff on the other side." You can quote me on this.