It's always "for the children"

Sometimes I wonder if even Hitler would have found more sympathy if he had pursued Lebensraum and the Final Solution because he "wanted to secure the future for Germany's children."

A tech company with ties to a school district plans to test a tracking system by putting computer chips on grade-schoolers' backpacks, an experiment the ACLU ripped Monday as invasive and unnecessary.

The pilot program set to start next week in the Middletown school district would have about 80 children put tags containing radio frequency identification chips, or RFID chips, on their schoolbags. It would also equip two buses with global positioning systems, or GPS devices...

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter to Kraeger and members of the school committee calling the plan "a solution in search of a problem" and saying the school district should already have procedures in place to track where its students are.

On Monday, he said the program raises enormous privacy and safety concerns.

"There's absolutely no need to be tagging children," he said. "We are not questioning the school district's ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves."

One reason (among several) I'm increasingly opposed to public schools is that many of them have become little more than kinder-concentration camps, complete with armed security, barbed wire fences, metal detectors, random searches and mandatory drug testing. Sure, all these provisions are in the name of "safety," but the net effect is to condition entire generations of children that "safety" is only found in total surveillance and control. Is this really the lesson we want to teach them? If so, what does that say about the future of our allegedly free nation? Those first graders carrying RFID chips on their backpack today may not blink an eye in 20 years when participating in society suddenly requires that chip be implanted under their skin.

"The philosophy of the schoolhouse in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next." -- attributed to Abraham Lincoln