Constant evaluation in schools teaches students that they are under constant surveillence and that privacy is illegitamate
The school system teaches students that they are under constant surveillance. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts exactly three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file reports about their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.
Teachers assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, The City of God, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, New Atlantis, Leviathan, and a host of other places. All the childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band
- number seven the impossibility of hiding. children are to be made to feel utterly powerless. every single piece of work they produce and everything they do must be subjected to constant and systematic surveillance examination and evaluation while so-called progress must be logged in cumulative records the fact that they are being watched all the time. should help to make the children feel as small as possible and understand that their ultimate purpose in life is to assume the position of minuscule objects to be placed under the absolute control of people with more power and status than me
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