School administrations should have less power than they have now, rather than more. If you let them be responsible for kids' actions outside of school, nothing good will come of it. They're not competent to take on that job.
- A student is being bullied. This bullying is happening using social media and or text messages. These messages are being sent at various times pseudo-anonymously but there's strong reason to know who it is.
Who, exactly, is the authority who we expect to look into this? Is it the police? Using what law/powers? Are social workers empowered? We're clearly not ok with the school doing it.
So is bullying that happens outside of school hours just a free-for-all? I'm genuinely asking. It is fine if everyone agrees that schools shouldn't and that it is authoritarian to do so, but then who exactly is the authority? If police are, then when the police slap handcuffs on a K-12 kid, everyone loses their mind about that too and asks "why is this a police matter?!" "Why are we criminalizing young people?!"
I'm not saying I have all the answers: Because I absolutely do not. But I am saying people need to think about the bigger picture about how this works and who is responsible for what.
The case was about one of the expelled students, their family lawyer arguing that they shouldn't have this incident on their student record because it occurred outside of school. I can't remember if they won the case or not, but the issue is complicated. When there is an issue between two students who only know each other from school, it can become a school issue whether it originated there or not.
I think the alternatives should be criminal record or student record.
"The only reason you know most of the people you did this to is... drum roll... because you are at the same school"
Parents, typically?
Police once it becomes harassment or assault (or threat of).
So if the issue is outside school, then the school is not the authority.
Is it bullying as in being mean or is it threats of violence? One of those is a crime that you can bring to police, the other is why you have a block button.
Pure cyberbullying can be pretty bad, but it's even worse when they're in your school, and you're forced to interact with them in that regard... and they can mess with you with no oversight outside school (and deniably).
For the most part, schools would rather not try and adjudicate things that happen outside school. But the reasonable interpretation of events between students, and the most reliable remedies, can be very different based on context from outside school.
Courts have held that schools have a lower threshold to justify a search, due to the need to maintain a safe environment that is conducive to learning.
Schools don't really want to be involved in the outside-school life of their students. But what happens on phones, etc, between students outside school hours absolutely affects the learning environment and how events at school should be interpreted.
Maybe schools should mind their own business instead of becoming totalitarian states that use permissive precedents to dig into everyone’s business.
If they want to play a foolish game, play it right back and watch them falter. My father had lots of fun doing this when I was in school, as most admin-level people don't know what truly is legal and what is not.
Here's a nice summary:
Maybe if we wanted people to believe that the political system of this country made sense and was worth protecting, we would structure our education system to reflect its alleged values.
Kids reading this, don't give them a confession, police or school admins, take the 5th.
Don't Talk to the Police - https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE They want to take your money or put you in a cage.
The two fully-grown adults who ran the security office were former police; judging by the 20+ department badges proudly displayed on their back wall, it looks like they'd been kicked out of every department. One wonders why!
I'm tired of Americans comparing anything bad to their geopolitical enemies, especially when Putin was backed by the CIA and MI6 as a useful wedge against communism. You don't get to fuck up the entire world with aggressive state interventions and then act like you're some bastion of democracy. Ask a Chilean what they think about US democracy. Or really anyone for that matter.
The government that most affects Americans day to day life are their state governments, many of which even allow for direct referendums.. of which the US has had thousands of. They are happening all the time, although they are usually local in interest and you usually won’t see them in our national news… unless they are particularly noteworthy:
Maybe you might remember the recent news of the Kansas referendum on abortion? Can’t get any more democratic than that.
(And by the way, several US states approved women’s suffrage before any country did.)
- 51% of people can do wrong against the other 49%.
- 51% of people can do wrong against themselves by making an uninformed decision.
- Tomorrow the 51% become the 49% and vice versa. If unchecked power was given to whoever was currently 51%, it would spell whiplash and chaos.
So you structure the whole thing into smaller deliberative bodies where people (who are periodically selected by 51% majorities) have better information and means to strike good compromises that are unattainable through raw public opinion. A fuller and more appropriate name for this is "a democratic republic", for which "democracy" is used as a shorthand.
Some of these bodies have authority only over local areas, because you can make a more tailored decision when you have fewer things to deal with. Some of these local bodies, as another commenter noted, may conduct referendums to decide whether to make a law. Other bodies have authority over the whole land, but only over coarse-grained topics with only highly limited authority over the smaller local bodies.
And at the highest level, there is one body where people's very local representatives have a vote and another body where people's region-wide representatives have a vote, and these bodies must agree in order to do most things.
And you make one small body almost completely insulated from public opinion so that you can task it with protecting not just 49% from the whims of 51%, but protecting one individual person (yes, even a guilty criminal individual) against the rest of the government and against whatsoever the remaining 330 million people may think of this person.
And yes, the vote for the president is not a raw popular vote. There is a level of indirection through another body that often does, but may not, yield the same result as a popular vote would. But it does not logically follow that Americans do not vote for their president.
And you don't let the president make laws or rule on cases or send the country to war.
The guiding principle is not to let one person or one group of people have too much power. A majority of Americans having consensus on a given issue is one such group whose power is intentionally limited.
Could the whole thing be designed better than it is? Of course. Will people always screw it up no matter how well designed it is? Of course.
Living in the United States now, as oppressive as it can be, is still living in one of the freest societies that's ever existed in history. You may think I'm saying that because I'm ignorant, but no, I am fully aware of all the ways the US is awful towards minorities of every stripe, of the poverty, of the gun crime, problems with access to healthcare, etc etc etc. I made my original post to criticize the US education system. I know about all of that and the United States is still better to live in than most of the world.
It doesn't mean I wouldn't like it to be better, that I'm not worried about how things are changing, or that everything - or even most things - the US has done are good. But we need to talk about the reality of the situation and you're not.
When my point is "the US should live up to its ideals", arguing "the US will never live up to its ideals no matter what" or "well, other people in X country don't like the US" is just unhelpful.
You may be confusing democracy with electoral democracy.
Or in other words, no different than Western society in general post-March 2020.
>we would structure our education system to reflect its alleged values
By our revealed preferences, the education system is a perfect reflection of our values.
Um... no? You need to provide more justification for that statement. (And a vague not towards COVID precautions isn't gonna do it.)
The author points out that in different words that if the school is worried about bullying, etc, then the appropriate response is to protect first, not work out who to punish first.
Trying to come up with fake guis and hiding stuff is not how this sort of issue should be approached. The issue needs to be squashed, and firmly, so that it doesn't occur in the first place. Prevention is better than cure, or in the case of a fake gui, less than half a cure.
The word "privacy" does not appear in the Constitution - you have no explicit right to privacy in the US
At the end the only way to win this cat & mouse game is to stand your ground before it starts.
But it's simpler to let the police handle the problem and determine whether it's harassment, or if it's a case of crybullying.
A school's not going to be able to stop bullying. But with message tracking devices in everyone's hand and cameras everywhere, the SCHOOL's problems are solvable without having to go into childrens' phones.
Unless the school is paying for your kid's phone and plan, they should have exactly zero say in how it's set up.
In this hypothetical scheme (described above), a child complaining about anonymous abusive messages is ignored by the school. School's not responsible, because the child's phone is set up improperly. If phone were in order, phone would not receive anonymous messages.
A child receiving a traceable abusive message is quickly resolved, and presumably this kind of abuse is rare, for obvious reasons.
Everyone is happy. The school's happy because, under this scheme, they have virtually no work to do in connection with online harassment. The police are happy because fewer harassment cases are being opened (this is true only if most kids set their phone as instructed by the school). Kids are slightly less miserable because online bullying has been made more difficult to pull off.
Finally, sticklers like the parent are happy because they can continue to set up their phone "wrong" and receive anonymous abuse. Which the school won't look into and will presumably pass off to the police.
