by John W. Whitehead

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“[P]ublic
school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national
security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools
into adjuncts of the surveillance and police stateÂ… students
are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit
their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers,
test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility
and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are
better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system
than by being valued members of the public schools.” ~ Professor Henry Giroux

For those hoping
to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point
in our nationÂ’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy
and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security,
expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than AmericaÂ’s public
schools.

Once looked
to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and
democracy to future generations, AmericaÂ’s classrooms are becoming
little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens. The moment
young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves
under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted,
scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on. Between metal detectors
at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance
cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of AmericaÂ’s
schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.

Add to this
the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them as if
they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a perfect
citizenry for our emerging police state – one that can be easily
cowed, controlled, and directed. Now comes the latest development
in the sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification
cards containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that
allow school officials to track every step students take. So small
that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce
a radio signal by which the wearerÂ’s precise movements can
be constantly monitored.

A pilot program
using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools in San Antonio,
TexasÂ’ Northside School District. In the so-called name of
school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones
Middle School are being required to carry these “smart”
ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively
broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast
290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school
officials to track studentsÂ’ whereabouts at all times.

School officials
hope to expand the program to the districtÂ’s 112 schools, with
a student population of 100,000. As always, thereÂ’s a money
incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, itÂ’s
increased state funding for the school system. Although implementation
of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping
that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking
the studentsÂ’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to
$1.7 million from the state government.

High school
sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the RFID
cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal
to wear an ID card.” Students who refuse to take part in the
ID program wonÂ’t be able to access essential services like
the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets
to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting
for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to
verify her identity using her old ID card. According to Hernandez,
teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want
to use the bathroom. School officials reportedly offered to quietly
remove the tracking chip from AndreaÂ’s card if the sophomore
would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and
publicly support the initiative. Hernandez refused the offer.

This is not
the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on unsuspecting
students and their parents. Schools in California and Connecticut
have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using RFID
chips to track students as early as 2004. With the RFID business
booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions,
ID Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school
districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security
and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based
company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve
percent.

RFID tags are
not the only surveillance tools being used on AmericaÂ’s young
people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif.,
have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David
Rosen explains:

Each school
day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’
phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time.
In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code
that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they
arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at
8pm. These students are also assigned an adult ‘coach’
who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are
doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get
to school.

Some schools
in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese and overweight
students with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement
and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their
lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating
habits of students. Schools in MichiganÂ’s second largest school
district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the
walls of the hallways in real time to let students know theyÂ’re
being watched.

Some school
districts have even gone so far as to electronically track students
without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a
Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed
with software that allowed school administrators to track their
behavior at home. This revelation led to the threat of a class-action
lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate
students and parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee
middle school placed cameras in the schoolÂ’s locker rooms,
capturing images of children changing before basketball practice.
Thankfully, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the
practice in 2008, ruling that students have an expectation of privacy
in locker rooms.

Clearly, thereÂ’s
something more sinister afoot than merely tracking which students
are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break. Concerned parent
Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not want
our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even acceptable
or mandatory,” she shared.

“Conditioned”
is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized
in their book, Work
Redesign, laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized
adults “are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many
of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually
can be shaped with relative ease.” Taking those ideas one step
further, psychologist Bruce Levine noted, “Behaviorism and
consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the
twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the
student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and
behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”

To return to
what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant
citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and
expendable, it is only because thatÂ’s what theyÂ’ve been
taught in the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations
who run the show.

More and more
Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to
grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing
homes. In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of
pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and
technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and
unwilling to challenge the status quo. All the while, in the name
of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security,
the government strips away our rights one by one – monitoring
our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies
and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing
the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance
state.

Whether or
not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting
to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless
for young and old alike.

October
16, 2012

Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send
him mail] is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. He is the author of The
Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).

Copyright
© 2012 The Rutherford Institute

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