Teacher: Leave them kids alone!

The problem of kids being bullied for their lunch money is an old problem, which has become a cliche in a certain flavour of school-orientated dramas. This being the case, it obviously needs a new, flashy solution:

All secondary pupils in Scotland should be given ID cards in an effort to stamp out bullying, according to a teaching union...

The [Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association] SSTA's general secretary, David Eaglesham, said the time had come for photographic identification to be added to the cards used to access school facilities.

Fortunately, the Scottish Greens seem to have their heads screwed on about this. Eaglesham "said that introducing such a system would also help prepare young people for "'the realities of identity management in the 21st Century.'" In response, Green MSP Patrick Harvie argues, "We should be preparing young people for the reality of defending their privacy and civil liberties against ever-more intrusive government systems."

The general introduction of cards in schools should be viewed alongside the use of fingerprinting at several establishments. At the recent Defy-ID National Gathering, a friend described this process as "grooming" children in preparation for ID cards and constant surveillance later in life. If kids are normalised to it while they're young, they'll never be able to imagine a world where we aren't constantly recorded, monitored, tracked and studied. That, of course, is exactly what those pushing the emergence of the surveillance society want. The longer we take to stop this, the harder it's going to get.