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Comment by panzagl | Hacker News Reader

Since I can't read the article I can only go with story time here- my wife has cameras in her room and she loves them. Fights about 'who started it' are ended with the words, 'Ok, let's look at the video'. And when some little bully gets called on the carpet and their bullying parent comes in all set to steamroller administration with 'that's not what my child said happened why are you picking on them' the principal just rolls the footage and watches as the realization that their kid is a little shit dawns on the parent.

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Nope. Not worth it.

There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched. Do we really care about the automatic resolution of petty squabbles between children, or even the coercion of children to never engage in petty squabbles? Do we really want to rob children of mischief, conflict resolution, and making a case for themselves in a way that cannot always be substantiated with hard evidence? Do we really want to condition young minds to see a constant surveillance as a kind of benevolent security blanket?

And that's not even all that's at stake. The Overton window is shrinking as it is, and academia has adopted a censorious and puritanical orthodoxy. Classes benefit a great deal from the students who care enough to challenge what is presented as de facto truth, but I'm inclined to believe that this will give a basis to silence that behavior. Looking back on my own experiences, would I have felt comfortable speaking out against teachers if I knew I was under surveillance? I'm not so sure. But in most cases, even the teachers themselves often told me that they were happy to have somebody engage them meaningfully. But some weren't so happy, and those are the ones that have a new channel for abuse.

And what about the teachers? Some of the best teachers I had would've been fired for what they taught, or allowed students to do. Allowing controversial class discussions, sometimes among students bordering too young to handle the subject matter. Doing a dangerous chemistry or physics demonstration that bends the rules slightly. A classroom led by a cheeky teacher was often ruined by the superintendent or principal standing in the doorway. Now they're in the doorway 24/7.

No one actually watches the video, unless something happens.

And this is an elementary classroom- resolution of petty squabbles means 28 kids don't get to learn while 2 others yell 'he did it first'. They can be beasts to each other at recess.

If it helps, this is a very realistic portrayal of how privacy is degraded over time. Invading privacy has all sorts of practical applications. You can fight crime more effectively, and measure trends, and generally be more effective at all sorts of capitalism and statecraft. But, problems, and risks just pile up over time. Just think of what we could do for just one small sacrifice!

But what privacy is there in a classroom? Theoretically the teacher could capture the same information by being more observant.

A wise teacher can offer a bit more dignity by choosing what they notice and draw attention to, or not.

Perhaps the same is true when choosing how to use video recordings?

Maybe. They're more ubiquitous, and almost certainly available to more parties. Can I really exercise my own judgement when my boss can watch the tape too?

My wife is a teacher and I promise you that principals don't want to have to manage their teacher's classes. They only step in when required or asked to.

No teacher can watch the entire classroom constantly and unfailingly.

But the teacher doesn’t create a permanent record of everything they observe.

I agree with you (my wife is also a teacher) but good luck with this crowd.

Some of the HN commenters are counting down the days until someone founds a libertarian utopian moon colony.

As a libertarian looking foreward to a moon base... Im totally good w cameras in the hands of civilians. I use my closed loop, not online connected, home serveilance system every month: saw at least 4 crimes and even caght a home invader. Passed the info we want to the cops but not all. We dont all hate cams: Some of us just dont want gov to have them on us all the time.

And let's get real here about how we solve problems with decreased privacy.

Good luck ever getting an official to do anything for you. If it does not benefit them or the system, they never have the time or authority to do it. The surveillance is to benefit the state, not the surveilled.

This is abstraction. How do you apply that to the case of a teacher sending misbehaving kids to the principal's office, and what would you want instead?

We've never required surveillance to send kids to the office before...

Having a teacher in the room has the same "you're being watched" effect as a camera, it's just less efficient at watching.

I want to highlight the tension between liberty & socialization here, because I think it's getting glossed over. Public education is a huge infringement on individual liberty - it's basically mandatory brainwashing of kids for 6-8 hours/day, 180 days/year, for 12 years. Nobody would realistically suggest getting rid of it, because we all grew up with it.

Taking it back a step, parenting is also an infringement on individual liberty - a child is totally dependent upon a parent, and oftentimes exposed to nothing other than the parent's views, and is biologically hard-wired to pick up on a parent's emotions and mirror them. Can't really blame society for that, though, evolution did it.

People who worry about the slippery slope are right to worry. But it's been going on for centuries. We think that our particular point on it is natural and right because that's what we grew up with, just as our kids might think pervasive surveillance is natural and right because that's what they grew up with - which is exactly what we're justifiably afraid of. If we lived on individual farming homesteads and someone proposed taking our kids away from us for the majority of their waking childhood, we'd probably be even more upset.

Probably the endgame is like the Matrix, where humans are confined to individual pods with no agency of their own, except that instead of being tapped for bio-energy we'll end up being used to train machine-learning algorithms.

Your analysis has an underlying assumption of individualism. That is, the ideology (quite common in the U.S.) that each person is competent to make their own decisions and has the right to do so independently of what anyone else might want.

Having kids or taking care of mentally declining parents tends to put a big dent in that. Or working in other situations where you commonly interact with people who are clearly no good on their own. However much lip service we might pay to it, respect for Autonomy and Individual Agency only goes so far when people are doing what's Clearly The Wrong Thing, then you have to decide when to step in.

Group decision-making is messier but in many ways more realistic. It isn't necessarily dystopian, though someone thinking in purely individualistic terms might see at as such.

That's my point, but I'm not taking a position on it (at least within this comment thread - I've got plenty of personal views on it that I apply to my personal life).

I'm pointing out that there's a continuum between total individual liberty, where everybody does exactly what they want, and living in a larger society of people, where your actions affect others and there need to be some sort of constraints on them. We've been picking points along this continuum for centuries, and sliding slowly towards more restrictions on individual liberty for the benefit of society simply because population density is higher now. The point we're at now, where we accept that giving your children over to an institution to be raised for half their waking childhood is normal but cameras in the classroom are abhorrent, is an arbitrary artifact of what we grew up with in our own childhoods. In the next generation, perhaps they'll view cameras in the classroom as normal but Matrix-style pods as abhorrent. Someday perhaps they just won't think, the same way a mitochondria (once an independent organism!) doesn't think too much about being a component of our cellular makeup.

> No one actually watches the video, unless something happens.

You must do PR for the NSA.

Or a school has fewer resources than the NSA.

And don't think I don't see the potential for abuse, but I see the potential for abuse in basically everything. You have to give organizations the benefit of the doubt the same way you do individuals.

> You have to give organizations the benefit of the doubt the same way you do individuals.

Why? I don't normally like being overly contrarian, but in this case this position is so naive that I just can't think of a good reason to do what you're proposing. Especially in the US (and certain other problematic countries) you really should know better than to trust an organisation with sensitive information.

> No one actually watches the video, unless something happens

You're right. Now, nobody watches unless something happens.

And then some shifty SV startup starts selling ML studentcams that determine what "bad" is. Of course, questioning the ML is verboten. It made the decision and you cannot ask why.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is the same reason I don't want e.g. FB collecting data on every action I take. I don't care if they can glean something from it today; the mere fact that such a database exists worries me about what they will be able to do with it tomorrow.

Having the other 28 kids see how to resolve petty squabbles is likely more valuable than their regularly scheduled elementary school lessons.

> No one actually watches the video, unless something happens

- Algorithms do (or will pretty soon )

Not right now maybe. The system will by laid in place before the truly objectionable use cases start cropping up.

> No one actually watches the video, unless something happens.

This is not reality. Even with access restrictions in place, people are going to weigh the pros and cons of watching the video to achieve their own ends.

Who might watch it? A supervisor or coworker with a vendetta. A student/teacher obsessed with a student/teacher. A pedophile. A teacher looking to silence a challenging (but not problematic) student. A racist looking to have a particular student removed. A student looking for embarrassing things about other students to post online. etc. etc.

I agree, it is normalizing surveillance such that the kids grow up expecting there to be camera everywhere and accepting it.

What's wrong with that though?

>There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched...

Maybe adults do, but I seriously doubt children do.

Maybe some child dev experts on HN could chime in here, but my understanding was that brain development is not complete until well after 18 years in humans. Not only that, but the ability to self regulate is particularly compromised in children.

Now I could be wrong. And, as I said, I welcome the child dev guys to chime in here, but I think these people are literally recording children who, because of human neurobiology, are unlikely to regulate due to the recording.

And I think the people doing the recording know that.

Children know to hide behavior from disapproving adults: they're not as stupid or underdeveloped as you think they are.

Kids are naive, not stupid. They will ignore the camera until someone gets caught... from then on Big Brother will be lurking in the shadows of their mind.

I grew up in an environment like that, my paranoid parents were a fan of security cameras all over the house because we grew up in a "risky" area. The cameras definitely led to a feeling of being mentally caged in, always being watched and worried about doing something wrong.

The Black Mirror "Arkangel" episode is a good commentary on omnipresent childhood surveillance...

> There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched

Then why do many students and young people post photo evidence of them engaging in illegal activity on social media? I don't think it would make much of a difference. Besides we're on camera in most places of commerce and in large cities, pretty much all the time.

> Do we really want to rob children of mischief, conflict resolution, and making a case for themselves in a way that cannot always be substantiated with hard evidence... Some of the best teachers I had would've been fired for what they taught, or allowed students to do.

I think you're romanticizing what goes on in a modern US school. No one is going to go after children for small mischief. They don't go after them now because its just not worth it not because they can't catch them doing petty infractions. As for the teachers, for every great teacher having controversial and important discussions with their students, there are 9 that just roll in a TV to watch a movie about once a week.

> Then why do many students and young people post photo evidence of them engaging in illegal activity on social media? I don't think it would make much of a difference. Besides we're on camera in most places of commerce and in large cities, pretty much all the time.

They never said being watched exclusively changes behaviour for the better.

> As for the teachers, for every great teacher having controversial and important discussions with their students, there are 9 that just roll in a TV to watch a movie about once a week.

The 10% are the ones that had the biggest impact on me as a student. They are also the ones most likely to be affected by the cameras. Hell, even in the 1990s, my European History teacher flat out said (paraphrasing), "I'd have to quit if they ever installed a camera in here. It wouldn't even work for measuring how I perform, because even if the students didn't know the cameras were in here, I would know. And it would affect how I teach things just as much as if the principal was sitting in the back row."

I would like to propose another reason as to why I think it's bad. I seriously believe that the constant surveillance of people through their phones is starting to cause problems. It's now awkward to not leave the house without your phone. What if someone needs you? What if you need to reach someone? To feel safe, people need to feel constantly within arms reach of help. Monitoring children this way, is essentially easing them into the same mindset. Someone is always watching what's happening. When they step out into the real world, disconnecting from that is sure to be jarring, and what I really fear is that uneasiness will push more people into believing we need to be under a surveillance state.

> There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched.

We definitely know that kids change their behavior when being watched, but most of the time we call that "parenting".

Exactly. Nobody behaves worse when they know they are being watched.

> There are mountains of evidence demonstrating that people change their behaviors when they know they are being watched.

Religion is a heck of a thing

Wait, there is a camera in the classroom itself, always on? The footage is saved somewhere and can be viewed by who knows who or what algorithm, judging by whatever standards the person or algorithmy applies at that time?

...justified by "solving" various conflicts in the classroom, conflicts that have root causes like large class sizes, social issues, stressful environments, overbearing parents, disrespected teachers or whatever - so we just build an panopticon?

Right now I can't even imagine watching surveillance video like that, seeing all kinds of reactions and emotions of people, of children interacting; what right do I have to systematically observe without them knowing?

Screw all of that. Spend any amound of money to have small class sizes, pay teachers better, make schools friendly and welcoming, have more counselors around or whatever.

But please throw out those cameras.

The footage is only kept at the school.

My wife's job is not to be the total arbiter of social justice for her students, it is to provide them with an education.

How can you ensure the footage is kept "at the school" (as if that was sufficiently limiting the exposure of the footage)? Who has physical access? Is the surveillance system cloud based? How is the school's security? Are her superiors legally allowed to watch the footage to evaluate performance? Could those overbearing aggressive parents eventually demand access to the footage, and worsen the whole problem?

Are the childrens' parents aware of the consequences of the cameras? That every tiny little move in the formative phase of their children's lifes is recorded for all eternity, and that data generally tends to leak, and all kinds of entities want access?

It is data. People were surprised when 1980s-era USENET forum posts where made accessible a few years ago. Back then it was unfathomable that this data would be searchable and accessible or even relevant, but it was. Same with our data now: it will be analyzed in ways we cannot even imagine.

I am stunned by how quickly surveillance spreads.

We worry today about incriminating twitter/FB posts derailing careers. What will happen when people can retrieve your childhood and show that OMG you dissected frogs?

The easy and correct solution is to... not make incriminating posts.

What may be completely normal and morally ok today might be a horrifying abuse of privilege and humanity tomorrow.

Just ask any US Democrat talking about race relations in the 1950s.

There are good questions below about lifetime of the video, etc. and while I can just state that everything is fine, the real answer is that schools in the US are not the closed organizations that are implied by a lot of the response here. School administration is 3 people, the district has a couple dozen. Budgets are public information, board meetings are open to all, and getting an agenda item to address concerns is not that difficult. This is the benefit to our education system not being centrally directed by some Federal organization who would be all too happy to have the 'FAANG Classroom Panopticon' installed so they can say they're 'doing something' about whatever the issue dujour is.

I don't think this addresses the concerns being replied to. Teaching is incredibly difficult and time consuming, and just like teachers do not have the time or expertise to also be full time social workers for their students, they also do not have the time or expertise to ensure that surveillance data about their students is appropriately secured and purged. The same applies to local school administration officials, who as you point out are few in number and already stretched too thin across their existing responsibilities.

I don't think anybody's saying that a particular teacher or administrator is to blame, but the original anecdote you shared is a bit chilling if you grew up expecting your childhood misdeeds to be forgotten over time. I remember that the most frightening thing the principal could say to you was "This is going in your permanent record"; the expectation otherwise was that it wasn't.

There are laws in place to address public release of info about minors. A lot of schools require a parent's signature before they'll post a public picture of a student, even if just captured incidentally. My wife's school is pretty paranoid about this stuff, mostly because of things like custody issues, restraining orders, etc. So a legal framework is in place, one with a little more teeth behind it than your typical EULA.

I understand that; I have also worked as a teacher. The problem is not that I expect schools to start willingly disclosing data about minors to whoever asks, but instead that there is so much data in the first place. A school with cameras everywhere -- even one that perfectly safeguards recorded video in perpetuity -- is teaching children that everything they do is on the record, ready to be marshalled as evidence against them at any point in the future. (To borrow a term from idlewords[1], such an environment conditions its occupants to a total lack of "ambient privacy.") Maybe that's the world we live in today, but it sucks.

[1]: https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

She would probably quickly change her opinion if a principle started regularly watching recorded videos, instead of doing in person teach evaluations...

yes yes it would be all nice if we would completely revamp school system (and why stop there) into something marvelous, but back in reality where it won't probably happen in our lifetimes, some hacks may make unbearable life if public school teacher slightly more bearable.

The problem is these teachers are part of the problem. A teacher that allows her class to be surveilled 24/7 is a shitty teacher, period.

Lol, how about 6/5?

> Spend any amound of money to have small class sizes, pay teachers better, make schools friendly and welcoming, have more counselors around or whatever.

I share your strong distaste for surveiling children, but I don't think throwing money at the problem is a good solution either. there are plenty of well funded elite private schools that do everything you suggest, but still have severe bullying problems.

I wish we had these as kids. The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room. Teachers spend all their time babysitting problem children instead of helping everyone else learn. Parents of problem kids do everything they can to push their children’s behavioral issues back on the teachers. Cameras in the classroom could go a long way to helping schools build record evidence that can be used against such students.

> Parents of problem kids do everything they can to push their children’s behavioral issues back on the teachers.

Whew. That's a lot of labeling! And the solution is to build evidence to be used against these tiny criminals.

Rather than just presume the kids are little shits on purpose and recording them to prove it, why not ask the kid what's going on at home? I'd bet real money that "lack of discipline" maps pretty closely to "lack of a stable home environment".

Well, yeah, but calling a parent in and saying 'you need to stop partying until 3am with your boyfriend of the week so Timmy can get some sleep and not be an impulsive little monster with no respect for his female teacher' does not go as well as you'd think.

Doesn't mean it's not true.

I don't see how this scenario is changed by having video of the child's misbehaviour.

Because discipline can be made to stick- Timmy can be suspended and when Mom comes in to say it can't be his fault, because that would imply it was her fault and she's never been held responsible for her actions before, oh well too bad video doesn't lie. Otherwise admin backs down about 50% of the time.

If you want to point out that this doesn't help Timmy, I'd agree. It does help the other 29 kids in the class, their parents, the teacher, and admin though.

It helps the other 29 kids in the class until there are altercations involving 5-7 of those.

Then it helps the other 22 kids in the class. What's the endgame? Do you suspend half the kids in the classroom because they're causing a disturbance for the other half?

Something this whole argument misses is that school is a great mechanism to teach kids to interact with each other and learn to solve problems.

It's a bad idea to teach kids that everything is always black and white.

> Do you suspend half the kids in the classroom because they're causing a disturbance for the other half?

Yes, you do!

> that school is a great mechanism to teach kids to interact with each other and learn to solve problems.

What kind of utopian school did you go to? None of my schools did this, at _all_.

Perhaps you could find a way to articulate your point about irresponsible parents without so much sexism. Or even better, without any sexism.

Because the teacher's job should be to teach, not to be a social worker.

Teachers in K-12 have never been focused on solely dispensing academic knowledge. Acclimation, acculturation, socialization; the list goes on of what they've always been expected to do. My MIL always said that her job (K-4) was to teach the little monsters how to be civilized. If they learned the three Rs, that was a bonus.

My mom's a K-12 teacher too. Not only should it not be their job to be a social worker, they're not qualified to do that work, either.

They end up having to do it anyways.

True, but they should also not be required to secure surveillance infrastructure and purge collected data at regular intervals.

Why would they be?

What do you think teachers are actually teaching? One of the very, very important skills kids learn is how to be socialized - how to behave with others in a social setting, how to be quiet and pay attention when that is appropriate, how to settle conflicts. These are all skills you can and should be learning in school. This is what teachers do, they don't just drill you on the three Rs.

There's a difference between teaching kids to socialize and serving as a de facto social worker.

Yeah, past a certain age almost all the problem kids have parents enabling them and/or causing tons of problems for them at home. You can't fix that in school, certainly not as long as parents are allowed to have any say in what happens there (which seems like something we should maybe not just get rid of), and if teachers start having to regularly go on home visits with the very parents who are accusing them (the teachers) of all kinds of nastiness because they sent precious little Timmy to the office for calling a fellow student the C-word and using their phone in class to post same on Insta, say goodbye to most of your teachers. They didn't sign up for that.

[EDIT] incidentally I'm baffled that so many schools allow phones in the building at all, let alone students to carry them to class as they're every bit as disruptive as one would think, but I gather that's another "pressure from loud, shitty parents" decision.

This is true, but it's not teachers who made the decision to spend resources on classroom surveillance. That's a call made at the administrative level, be it in the school or the district as a whole--and that's ultimately where the decision of how to approach problematic classroom behavior is being made.

Sure, because children don't have personality or autonomy. You only get that when you turn 18. /s

I don't think the cameras are a net win as the acclimation of the students to a total surveillance state has broader consequences.

What we really need is the ability for teachers to evict unruly students without having to build a multi-month evidence file. A classroom is a place to learn and there should be zero tolerance for repeat offenders. We're putting so much in the hands of teacher's as it is; giving them the option to judge behavior isn't a stretch.

To people who say that's too much power for the teachers (ex: "It's not fair! She had it in for my kid from day one!") I say phooey. Odds are your kid really is a disruptive jerk. And if a teacher truly is the problem the answer to that is to be able to fire teachers as well.

>The number one problem with education in the US is the lack of discipline in the class room.

Surely lack of adequate funding, crumbling infrastructure, out-of-date textbooks or lack of textbooks, bad curricula, a highly regimented and normative model of education (with "normal" kids and "problem" kids) and many other things could be judged to be more significant issues than "lack of discipline", which might be slapped on as a label to basically any issue that causes conflict. "Well, if only the children [ i.e., non-adults who literally lack executive function and cannot control their behavior ] were more disciplined, things would be fine."

US schools are very well funded. Adjusted for purchasing power, US educational spending is up there with Switzerland and Norway as the highest in the OECD for primary and secondary education, and is the highest for tertiary: https://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng....

Primary school aged children have plenty of executive function. We’re not talking about daycares for toddlers. Americans just have very low expectations for discipline. Have you ever seen the inside of a classroom in Asia?

There's a gap between schools being well-funded, and the money being well-spent.

Administrative bloat's pretty bad, and from what I've seen a serious audit/investigation of every district in the country would turn up north of 50% being full of corruption—padded stipends, kickbacks for building contracts, hiring the spouse of an assistant super to do nothing, promoting "favorites" to higher paying positions (exactly what it sounds like, happens all the time), that kind of thing.

This makes sense. I am also ok with surveillance cameras whose footage gets only used when something happened and otherwise gets discarded. But cameras that feed into a system that constantly analyzes the video is pretty creepy and has potential for a lot of abuse. So let’s go old fashioned and set up a camera with a VCR by no internet connection or analytics capability.

Even a VCR tape gets put into cold storage and can be converted into a digital stream any time later.

Data is extremely persistent and it's very easy to forget this.

My partner is a teacher here in Ontario Canada. We couldn't be more against this idea.

Sure, your example of conflict resolution seems nice but there is no crisis of "who started it" that needs this level of intrusion. Truth is these classroom conflicts almost never have a clear cut instigation point. I guarantee you a bully will figure out how to egg another student on outside of the camera's view and then slyly provoke that student when the tape is rolling. These conflicts start outside, on the sidewalk, last week, on the internet ect. These are complex social dynamics that are best dealt with using the teacher's training and experience combined with addition school staff when needed.

Her classroom is a friendly place where students learn a second language. It must be protected from this.

Witness the NFL. Huge amount of viewers of each game, video replay, multiple cameras. The players know they're being watched the minute they step out of the locker room. Yet you still see them failing to exhibit restraint when goaded on by an opponent. The referees always fail to notice the instigators, but almost always catch the retaliators...

thanks for the real life anecdote. just like in startups, its helpful to hear from the actual users instead of what some armchair critics feel is happening.

however, i do worry about fights and bullying being taken to 'the dark corners of the school' such as the bathroom or some unused stairwell

>however, i do worry about fights and bullying being taken to 'the dark corners of the school' such as the bathroom or some unused stairwell

1) They did that a lot back in the "old days" anyway, since it was away from other people

2) bullies usually have poor impulse control and don't think immediately about the consequences of their actions, so they frequently won't think about the cameras, so at least some of the time they'll do their bullying in view of the cameras.

regarding 2) that may be true of many bullies, but I would expect at least some of them to learn how to get away with it. I could certainly imagine that some bullies would start exclusively tormenting their victims in camera deadzones and the victim finally stands up for themselves in view of the camera. all the evidence would show that that kid started a fight unprovoked.

I think prisons show this is true. They're arguably some of the most surveilled areas in society yet have many occurrences of violent and serious crime.

I don't know how much it even really decreases outbursts in the classroom- this is at the elementary level so all the kids are pretty impulsive. But the reality is that it gives teachers a tool to make admin and parents address the behaviors without just dismissing it.

#2 sounds like natural selection that'll result in more effective bullies.

Outside of school "bullying" is a kind of crime. Either assault, battery or mugging. For some reason juveniles get the epithet instead of the real thing, as if it is less grave or something...

Not all bullying is physical, and the "school to prison pipeline" approach has its own major issues.

Bullies are extremely effective at detecting and determining safe times and places to bully others. My tormentors waited til right after school, til I left school property. Then it was Mad Max time to make it home...

3) the hallways are already monitored by cameras in many schools, and the kids, though informed, often completely forget about it until reminded for some reason.

> however, i do worry about fights and bullying being taken to 'the dark corners of the school' such as the bathroom or some unused stairwell

That is easily solveable: Video surveillance in unused stairwells and bathrooms (ideally individual stalls).

What, suddenly people have problems with that? A panopticum only works when the threat of surveillance is ever-present.

>however, i do worry about fights and bullying being taken to 'the dark corners of the school' such as the bathroom or some unused stairwell...

Maybe you're relatively young, but I'd wager the old heads among us remember the days when these things were settled out at the bike racks. So that worry was already happening, and had been happening for a very long time.

The lesson learned from zero tolerance tolerance policies is that there's no reason to hold back if you're both going to get in trouble.

Yes. Not all bullies are idiots. Some are quite clever. They will torment and provoke their victims just off camera, then move into view of the camera as the victim starts to hit back.

Most people who have had more than one kid, or who have supervised children in any capacity, know that some of them will make a game of setting up the other to get blame for something the first one started.

> my wife has cameras in her room and she loves them.

Police also loves more surveillance. The push against surveillance tries not to help the (maybe benevolent) oppressor, but the (potential) oppressed.

Chilling effects exist, plus the potential for abuse. (And not by the policeman, but whoever gives him orders most likely.)

Well of course, your wife gets a huge benefit out of it. However the kids are the ones who are paying the cost.

It is - like many things in the messy world of compulsory education - obviously a trade off. The alternative cost is lost educational opportunity if these disruptions prevent students from learning.

This is almost literally the premise of an actual Black Mirror episode. While I do have some nest cameras, I'm likely never going to use them to resolve a family dispute, talking works for me.

I'd also feel uneasy at normalizing such surveillance for my kids. I'd like them to be able to sort a dispute without recourse to a video that won't always be there. Family disputes can often have an emotional dimension too, one that simply playing back a cold video account of the event won't resolve.

I'd be worried that that encourages extremely crude resolution strategies (ie. "Whoever threw the first punch is at fault. Look how objective this is! See, it's all on camera!").

This is horrifying.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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