@jackiekjono

7 months ago

A friend of mine teaches history and political science and has given at least one lecture on the Stazi every year for about 40 years now. For many years, he could always count on kids being absolutely shocked about the level of surveillance people were under. Somewhere around 2005 or so, he started getting well-reasoned arguments from students for the other side. A few years later, he stopped getting those and would get little sing-song replies of, "they watch us to keep us safe" from students who had never imagined that they could live safely without being watched constantly by someone. He couldn't quite figure out what happened. My job required me to visit schools. A few weeks after he told me about that, I happened to overhear a principal talking to a 7 or 8 year old boy because she had seen him on the video cameras hanging out in a part of the school where he should not have been and she asked him what he was doing there. He didn't say a word. I am pretty sure he was just too scared to speak. As she finished lecturing him on not straying from where he is supposed to be, she asked him, Why do we watch you?" He wouldn't answer. After a long silence, she answered for him. "We watch you to keep you safe." I very nearly fell out of my chair. Now, I wouldn't want to rag on that particular principal who is in many other ways a really good principal but, I think somewhere along the line, someone wrote a piece of curriculum about how to talk to kids about security cameras and no one else felt the need to reinvent the wheel so they all use the same bad curriculum which is this "we watch you to keep you safe" nonsense and children are getting that message when they are 5 and never hearing anything else until they get to my friend's class and hear about the Stazi.

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