I recently came upon a post on slashdot which talked about UK schools beginning to monitor social sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and confiscating cellphones in order to control what is referred to as cyber-bullying. The question that comes to my mind is simple, well it might actually be a bit more complex, are schools supposed to monitor and punish the students because of what they do outside of their school hours?
I’ve been noticing a trend in which parents rely on the schools to basically raise their children, where they expect the school to teach them things that should actually be taught by the parents themselves, things which completely fall out of the scope of what a school should really be. My definition of a school is where you obtain the general knowledge needed to not be considered an ignorant on subject such as science, mathematics and languages while also teaching socialism.
Parents now want the schools to monitor their children at every moment, basically leaving their job of parent up to the school, they also want the schools to monitor what their children do online. Schools work on a tight budget and having to purchase all of the necessary equipment and books that are required so that the students can learn, this leaves them with little to no budget left for other projects that they wish to carry out, and now they also want to invest in having people monitor what is being posted on Internet websites, something that has nothing to do with what the students actually do on school grounds.
This is something that parents should do and not leave this to another entity to do. Parents nowadays are becoming more and more lazy with their children and prefer to have someone else look after them, now I don’t know who thought that this is to be considered as good parenting, but honestly I don’t consider this as being just that. I guess that my post on privacy would somewhat apply on this subject, since the privacy of the students are violated, sure the bullying has gone from the physical act to the cyber world where kids post mean messages about other people just because they think differently or did something they didn’t like or even consider them as being inferior to them, this reminds me of a television movie that basically was about these girls that would just post mean messages on an Internet site about another girl from the same school.
Bullying is something that not only happens in the schools where our children attend but also happens in our place of work and just about anywhere else where there is a gathering of people who are, in some cases, strangers to each other. I’m not going to get into what bullying is because you should already know and if you don’t then I’ll leave it as homework.
What are your opinions on the subject?
Should schools monitor kids after hours? Yes and no. No because they technically don’t have the rights or authority too. However, Yes, because if there is a case of “cyber-bullying” and it carries over into the school to something physical, then I see no harm in them watching and acting upon it, but unless it is to prevent violence to another student while on school grounds, they shouldn’t be able to, or at least shouldn’t be able to disclose it.