KIDTRAX: ANOTHER INVASION INTO YOUR FAMILY
KIDTRAX: ANOTHER INVASION INTO YOUR FAMILY
Tricia Smith Vaughan
July 30, 2006
NewsWithViews.com
Only after I read The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto did I begin to think about how intrusive homework is on children’s lives. While I am thankful for Gatto’s insight, I am somewhat mad at myself for not seeing the obvious: Children spend at least six hours in school each day. Why can’t all the learning be done during that time?
Indeed it can. Ask any homeschooler.
But no, no. The efficient and effective education of most homeschoolers doth not please the NEA, or most government school teachers. If stuff that is supposed to be learned during the day seeps into our home in the evening, the NEA achieves its goal of brainwashing children to be socialist slaves 24 hours each day. What's the good, really, in making a part-time socialist?
Thinking outside our conditioned Skinnerian boxes, you can easily see how big of an invasion an hour or two of homework each night is to families. Besides, I can’t imagine a better way of teaching a child to hate learning than to make him or her suffer through homework after being confined in a government school all day.
Nonetheless, our government rulers and their lackeys, mainstream media, extol the virtues of homework and even coach parents on how supposedly to help their children with this unnecessary beast. Parents feel as though they’re wonderful people for adhering to the rules of their children’s local government school change agent. Meanwhile, children’s focus is taken away from their families each night and given to some teacher whose job it is to find which career slave spot the child is best slotted for.
How much better would it be if parents would spend the precious time that homework takes away helping their children to start a business, reading the Bible, or simply talking to their children? Instead, parents must allow one or two hours, after the child’s after-school activities, to review lessons that were supposed to be learned during the day. It’s been a government- and mainstream-media sanctioned intrusion into our homes for over 100 years.
Homework is an excellent way to track children and their parents, seeing how the parents will react to their children’s assigned work. Will the parent help? Complain? Be a cheerleader for the socialist agenda of the schools? Or will the parent even be allowed to help with homework? The answers to all these questions reveal much about the family, much that the government change agents can record dutifully in a child’s cumulative record.
But those who have willingly allowed homework to invade their home and family can now prepare for an even greater invasion. Now, parents and their children will be tracked to an even greater degree. KidTrax, a database that lists all kinds of information on publicly-schooled children in Kentucky, is being touted as a wondrous innovation. According to its site, KidTrax makes it easy to” track virtually any information . . . from basic demographics, such as birth date, sex and ethnicity, to more targeted types of data like participation in government assistance programs, jersey sizes, and non-insured status.” Yes, jersey sizes. Nice. The government schools in Kentucky are buying this marketing ploy; in fact, they can’t wait to start tracking:
“If schools and afterschools share a mission of helping students succeed, why not share school data about who these kids are and what they need?”
Why not, indeed? I admire the way that mainstream media and corporations can make a huge invasion of family life look as innocuous and beneficial as a trip to the pediatrician to receive an antibiotic for a persistent ear infection. It’s called excellent public relations. And privacy snatchers, who live to invade family life, are wonderful at swaying the public to accept invasions of privacy. Just as doing homework has been sold as a way to succeed in life, the coming privacy invasions are being sold as innocently as the Teletubbies or Barney, as just another little bit of help for us ailing parents, from our benevolent rulers. It’s happening in Kentucky and it will spread like Federal Reserve Notes, across our once-free country:
“An estimated 6.5 million children are in afterschool . . . No longer do afterschool workers have to bug parents to drop off their kids' report cards. Now each child is tracked by KidTrax . . . . It connects to the school system though a separate software program. When students show up at an afterschool facility, they swipe their bar-coded ID cards through a reader, much like a credit-card scanner. The ID cards look like a driver's license, and they light up computer screens with data about the students. Afterschools can find out whether their students' families receive food stamps, or whether the student can swim, has applied for college scholarships or got into trouble for rowdiness.”
My first thought was, “Great! That’s what parents deserve who keep their children locked up in some supposed academic enrichment program after being locked up in school all day!” Obviously, it wasn’t my most tolerant moment. This KidTrax thing, which takes the onus off parents to actually have to talk with their children’s babysitters, links to that all-important database that the government is building on all of us sheep.
Like good little ruminant mammals, we are not amazed or even terrified that Leviathan is tracking our children. We are indeed grateful for one less responsibility, being that we’ve already, of course, given up the responsibility to teach and raise our children. Handing the evidently way too onerous responsibility to the government of taking a report card from one babysitter to another will free parents for lots of important things: to make that one more PowerPoint presentation at work or to have that extra mocha latte.
As the publicity article states, KidTrax is there to help parents. Surely, we can all agree on that, can’t we? All this technology does is to place the child’s personal information in an easily readable electronic form, perhaps as a precursor to some rice-sized microchip that parents will soon clamor to have implanted in their progeny. But who cares? Technology that invades our privacy is good for us! The government schools have been teaching us for decades that we should have no privacy, no family secrets.
As with retina scanning in some government schools, parents will look on KidTrax as if it’s a wonderful, time-saving technology. Like homework, it’s there to help students. And besides, if you have nothing to hide in your family, then, why worry?
In fact, I’d keep repeating that mantra to myself if I were you: I have nothing to hide! I have nothing to hide! Soon, you’ll need it. With tracking devices such as KidTrax making it look as though an invasion of privacy is beneficial, you’ll soon have no privacy to lose.
© 2006 Tricia S. Vaughan - All Rights Reserved
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tricia Smith Vaughan has a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communication, a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, and a Master of Arts in English. Before she became a mom, she taught first-year English Composition and Literature for five years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. She has also worked in television, radio, and advertising.
She has written for the Los Angeles Times, Durham, N.C.’s Independent Weekly, Raleigh, N.C.’s News and Observer, and other newspapers. She performs stand-up comedy and writes about homeschooling and other momly stuff.
Tricia Smith Vaughan
July 30, 2006
NewsWithViews.com
Only after I read The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto did I begin to think about how intrusive homework is on children’s lives. While I am thankful for Gatto’s insight, I am somewhat mad at myself for not seeing the obvious: Children spend at least six hours in school each day. Why can’t all the learning be done during that time?
Indeed it can. Ask any homeschooler.
But no, no. The efficient and effective education of most homeschoolers doth not please the NEA, or most government school teachers. If stuff that is supposed to be learned during the day seeps into our home in the evening, the NEA achieves its goal of brainwashing children to be socialist slaves 24 hours each day. What's the good, really, in making a part-time socialist?
Thinking outside our conditioned Skinnerian boxes, you can easily see how big of an invasion an hour or two of homework each night is to families. Besides, I can’t imagine a better way of teaching a child to hate learning than to make him or her suffer through homework after being confined in a government school all day.
Nonetheless, our government rulers and their lackeys, mainstream media, extol the virtues of homework and even coach parents on how supposedly to help their children with this unnecessary beast. Parents feel as though they’re wonderful people for adhering to the rules of their children’s local government school change agent. Meanwhile, children’s focus is taken away from their families each night and given to some teacher whose job it is to find which career slave spot the child is best slotted for.
How much better would it be if parents would spend the precious time that homework takes away helping their children to start a business, reading the Bible, or simply talking to their children? Instead, parents must allow one or two hours, after the child’s after-school activities, to review lessons that were supposed to be learned during the day. It’s been a government- and mainstream-media sanctioned intrusion into our homes for over 100 years.
Homework is an excellent way to track children and their parents, seeing how the parents will react to their children’s assigned work. Will the parent help? Complain? Be a cheerleader for the socialist agenda of the schools? Or will the parent even be allowed to help with homework? The answers to all these questions reveal much about the family, much that the government change agents can record dutifully in a child’s cumulative record.
But those who have willingly allowed homework to invade their home and family can now prepare for an even greater invasion. Now, parents and their children will be tracked to an even greater degree. KidTrax, a database that lists all kinds of information on publicly-schooled children in Kentucky, is being touted as a wondrous innovation. According to its site, KidTrax makes it easy to” track virtually any information . . . from basic demographics, such as birth date, sex and ethnicity, to more targeted types of data like participation in government assistance programs, jersey sizes, and non-insured status.” Yes, jersey sizes. Nice. The government schools in Kentucky are buying this marketing ploy; in fact, they can’t wait to start tracking:
“If schools and afterschools share a mission of helping students succeed, why not share school data about who these kids are and what they need?”
Why not, indeed? I admire the way that mainstream media and corporations can make a huge invasion of family life look as innocuous and beneficial as a trip to the pediatrician to receive an antibiotic for a persistent ear infection. It’s called excellent public relations. And privacy snatchers, who live to invade family life, are wonderful at swaying the public to accept invasions of privacy. Just as doing homework has been sold as a way to succeed in life, the coming privacy invasions are being sold as innocently as the Teletubbies or Barney, as just another little bit of help for us ailing parents, from our benevolent rulers. It’s happening in Kentucky and it will spread like Federal Reserve Notes, across our once-free country:
“An estimated 6.5 million children are in afterschool . . . No longer do afterschool workers have to bug parents to drop off their kids' report cards. Now each child is tracked by KidTrax . . . . It connects to the school system though a separate software program. When students show up at an afterschool facility, they swipe their bar-coded ID cards through a reader, much like a credit-card scanner. The ID cards look like a driver's license, and they light up computer screens with data about the students. Afterschools can find out whether their students' families receive food stamps, or whether the student can swim, has applied for college scholarships or got into trouble for rowdiness.”
My first thought was, “Great! That’s what parents deserve who keep their children locked up in some supposed academic enrichment program after being locked up in school all day!” Obviously, it wasn’t my most tolerant moment. This KidTrax thing, which takes the onus off parents to actually have to talk with their children’s babysitters, links to that all-important database that the government is building on all of us sheep.
Like good little ruminant mammals, we are not amazed or even terrified that Leviathan is tracking our children. We are indeed grateful for one less responsibility, being that we’ve already, of course, given up the responsibility to teach and raise our children. Handing the evidently way too onerous responsibility to the government of taking a report card from one babysitter to another will free parents for lots of important things: to make that one more PowerPoint presentation at work or to have that extra mocha latte.
As the publicity article states, KidTrax is there to help parents. Surely, we can all agree on that, can’t we? All this technology does is to place the child’s personal information in an easily readable electronic form, perhaps as a precursor to some rice-sized microchip that parents will soon clamor to have implanted in their progeny. But who cares? Technology that invades our privacy is good for us! The government schools have been teaching us for decades that we should have no privacy, no family secrets.
As with retina scanning in some government schools, parents will look on KidTrax as if it’s a wonderful, time-saving technology. Like homework, it’s there to help students. And besides, if you have nothing to hide in your family, then, why worry?
In fact, I’d keep repeating that mantra to myself if I were you: I have nothing to hide! I have nothing to hide! Soon, you’ll need it. With tracking devices such as KidTrax making it look as though an invasion of privacy is beneficial, you’ll soon have no privacy to lose.
© 2006 Tricia S. Vaughan - All Rights Reserved
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tricia Smith Vaughan has a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communication, a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, and a Master of Arts in English. Before she became a mom, she taught first-year English Composition and Literature for five years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. She has also worked in television, radio, and advertising.
She has written for the Los Angeles Times, Durham, N.C.’s Independent Weekly, Raleigh, N.C.’s News and Observer, and other newspapers. She performs stand-up comedy and writes about homeschooling and other momly stuff.
posted by shummer60 at Saturday, August 05, 2006
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