English schoolkids go on strike until CCTVs are removed from classes

Students at Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex, UK walked out of classrooms that had been equipped with CCTV cameras and refused to attend classes for three weeks until their civil liberties were respected. Students from the school are hashing over the issues in the comment area for the local news report, in incredibly intelligent, reasonable fashion. These kids give me hope for the future. I wonder if I can send Poesy there once she's old enough.

It meant they missed three weeks of studies and led to the drafting of a petition signed by about 150 of their peers.
A father, whose son took part in the walk-out, said the school was wrong not to consult parents about the use of technology which "threatened our children's civil liberties"...
Epping Forest MP Eleanor Laing, who has written to the school on behalf of concerned parents, and is due to meet the Information Commissioner to discuss the case, said: "We need to find out if the pupils are happy to be filmed but there are two valid sides to this argument, and I am trying to get to the bottom of it."

LOUGHTON: Pupils walk out of lessons in protest against Big Brother cameras (Thanks, @davidgerard!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

In Europe it seams that young people’s innate independence hasn’t been totally destroyed. From Greece to France, and now apparently the UK, students are standing up and demanding more freedom.

I don’t you could organize something like this in the USA, and even if you could, I think the administration, police, and parents would squash it before it got anywhere.
pKp

The comments on the Guardian article are actually quite interesting. Three reactions from three kids who go to that school, including one involved in the protest itself.

Oh, and btw, how old are those kids ? I’m not familiar with the British school system.
Anonymous

Epping Forest MP Eleanor Laing: “We need to find out if the pupils are happy to be filmed…”

Dear heart, do people who are happy with a situation walk away from it for weeks on end, and sign petitions to change it?

Pity the residents of Epping Forest. If this is the level of competence their MPs possess, then they are badly in need of a by-election!

Someone might also want to inform MP Laing that these pupils were not being “filmed”. Oh, but if only cheap CCTV gear were as expensive as film processing, this idiocy would disappear overnight.
dasbin

@33: It appears as though the cameras ARE focused on the teacher. If you read the comments in the original article, there are quite a number from people claiming to be part of the school, and what happened was this: the principal eventually sent out a letter to all members of the school explaining the reasoning behind the cameras was to train teachers, ala the Bill Gates video (#6), which I think is actually a really good idea. I don’t know how you do this without infringing on privacy, and there’s probably a way better way of going about it than this school did, but it appears the students and teachers are all now relatively OK with the idea.
pecoto

In our school district (and most of California) it is illegal to film in a classroom without the express permission of the school board (which they normally give for in-school video productions and school related events only). This protects the privacy of the students and teachers. The real problem here is that every student has a cell phone which is more than capable of causing a severe lack of privacy for all sides. Many kids at our school have been suspended and expelled for taking up-skirt shots and having child pornography (i.e. nude shots of themselves and other students) on their cameras and i-pods. Fights have been staged in school just so they could put a video of the event on youtube to gain some sort of odd notoriety (perhaps infamy is the better term here). Little brother is the problem here…not big brother.
Anonymous

wow. that’s my old school.

seems like the future caught up with it
Ambiguity

So, some people say that we have school systems where the students wont behave unless they are constantly watched. Other people claim the we have teachers who have to be constantly watched to ensure they are discharging their duties well.

Let’s accept these claims for the nonce.

This leads me to observe — and you’ll have to excuse be for using caps, but the blink tag has been deprecated: THIS IS A BIG FUCKING PROBLEM.

Installing cameras everywhere dose nothing to address the problem.

And before someone asks “well, what would you do to address this ‘problem’?” let me say: That’s a very good question. It’s one that we should be addressing, and in a real way. Pontificating with vague rhetoric about “traditional values” and the like isn’t really taking the analysis to any depth. But things are so broken now we don’t even know how to frame the questions, much less examine them with lucidity and thoughtful insight.
phisrow

Unfortunately, you seem to have sharply overstated the kids’ success. The cameras are still there, the protesters have been condescendingly denigrated, and only the “information minister’s” OK is now required(and, this being Britain, the only difficulty in that will be pulling the information minister away from his gigantic bank of CCTV monitors long enough for him to approve the project).

2 steps backward and .5 steps forward, along with a mushy quasi apology, is what losing looks like.
ThermobaricTom

Good on em! I send them my full support, in the form of this comment they may never see.
dasbin

I’m as much against the Big Brother direction of the UK these days as the next guy, but I thought I should mention this video where Bill Gates makes some remarkably good points for using CCTV in classrooms to improve crummy teaching:

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
Anonymous

I don’t believe in keeping footage from classrooms or even looking at it. BUT I do think that cctv in a school is a good idea. This is because there is so much bullying and downright violence going on and also plenty of ‘one person’s word against another’ going on.

As the parent of a child who ended up with NO education due to being bullied by both kids and teachers and who was constantly told he was ‘making it all up’ – it would have been wonderful to be able to say go to the tapes and look at the hours between X and X and then try and say he is making it up.

Plenty of children are physically and emotionally damaged in unsafe environments – I think their well-being outranks the possible embarrassment of someone who *might* one day fancy joining one of the most untrustworthy professions.

If the tapes were sealed and not viewable except in situations where teachers or children needed them viewed for specific incidents to be investigated – then I see no problem at all.

There are ways of making sure that this was the case – and ways to ensure that the tapes were wiped after a certain period of time.

But public viewing or general browsing should never be allowed. Frankly as someone who once had cctv outside my house due to a nasty neighbour – we never looked at the tapes except once to provide evidence of a specific crime and as we had been party to that incident it wasn’t a BIg Brother thing more an electronic witness to corroborate the facts. Then the tapes were wiped.
Anonymous

damned right.

there are so many thing wrong with the idea of video monitoring students that it’s hard to decide which is the worst.

do we:

monitor their opinions in class
monitor who they look at
monitor their facial expressions

and then, what do we do with this info? do we apply it to job interviews? credit ratings? social services?

schools are supposed to be an area of learning and of ideas. they are supposed do dissemninate information, not to harvest it.

the students are right to protest. their parents could learn a lesson from them
sfazzios

I actually think video recordings of the classroom is a great idea… with a couple caveats. The camera should be focused on the teacher, and the entirety of the recordings should be made available to the general public. Students, as well as the general public, would have the opportunity to learn from the best lectures on any particular topic. In addition, there are more than a few lazy/incompetent/tenured k-12 teachers that I’d love to hold up to public scrutiny.
z7q2

@38 “well, what would you do to address this ‘problem’?”

Have trained observers sit in the back of the classroom and evaluate the teacher’s performance. This happens all the time right now. Unfortunately, not to the extent that it should due to budget constraints and/or mismanagement. Expanding this oversight program would be a good thing.
wolfiesma

I once taught in a preschool “learning lab” where one wall was a one-way mirror. There wasn’t a moment you didn’t wonder if your professors, parents, or fellow students were right there watching you, tracking every word.

Yeah, it pretty much sucked.
mackenzi

Just googled iSchool and found that application developers are working on an platform like the iTunes Radio program that lets a viewer select a school and subsequent class to examine. Mostly this is so parents can check on thier children on their coffee breaks.
Anonymous

Privacy rights of teachers and students aside, debatable as they are, I wish for classrooms with cameras. I would really like to take my high school classes again, paying attention this time. I’m paying for the classes to be taught, without directly getting the benefits. I want the info I’m paying for, now that I’m mature enough to appreciate it.

I asked one of my friends, a teacher, about the possibility of webcams. He said it would never happen because of the teacher’s union, and because the history (his course) is copyrighted by the textbook makers. Say WHAT??!? Well, the history isn’t, but the descriptions of it are. So, making this education available to the public would be prohibited without paying extra money. Nice racket, owning history.

So, the possibility of helping suppress and catch the bullies, cheats, dealers and thieves in every class really becomes moot… it’s stymied by corporate greed.
Anonymous

There are NOT two valid sides to this.

The only valid side to this “debate” is that there should NEVER be CCTV cameras in classrooms. I mean Jesus, are they prisons or places of learning and mutual respect?? The further you distance the school and its authority figures from the students, the more you scold and disrespect the students, the more those students will act out and feel like a babied enemy. It is up to THOSE authority figures to foster a school that doesn’t need such security measures, otherwise it’s a failure of a school and CCTV cameras will do nothing significant to change that.

The very roots of our school systems all over the world are flawed and failing us. We must stop being so juvenile as a society and be willing to change radically the way we teach and raise our young. We must cut the BS and REALLY decide without bias/hesitation what the best ways to teach/prepare/empower kids are. Bandaids do nothing for organ failure.
WarEagle

my highschool had cameras and that was 10 years ago. not in each classroom but certainly most places like the halls, lunch area, parking lot outside, gym etc..i can’t really see the big deal. what liberties are being lost? are their souls being stolen by the cameras?

UK is a crazy place for CCTV i agree..but you know, kids need supervision..teachers too! I think the only “right” being lost here is the right to anonymously misbehave.
demidan

And just what are the “two sides”?
mackenzi

“It’s a Sin” PET SHOP BOYS DISCOGRAPHY
IWood

#1 posted by Anonymous:

I don’t you could organize something like this in the USA, and even if you could, I think the administration, police, and parents would squash it before it got anywhere.

Maybe.

But unlike the UK, the USA doesn’t have the highest number of CCTV cameras per capita in the world, which makes such an exercise unnecessary.
Anonymous

After reading this story, for some reason I have Pink Floyd running through my head….
rollerskater

england is so bad these days i wouldn’t trade texas for it, even if europe had to take W as part of the trade.
mackenzi

I would like to see these proceedings on the Internet. Cory, perhaps when Poesy gets to be school age, you can help watch her.
ral8158

Wareagle: Twenty years after you graduate school, you decide you’re unhappy with the status quo and run for political office.

The reigning powers have access to hundreds of hours of footage of you in a classroom. You, not being a government official, do not have access to hundreds of hours of footage of you sitting in a classroom.

Now tell me, have you ever done anything in school that would be embarassing for your political aspirations?

(Security cameras are necessary for large, unsupervised areas like hallways and lunchrooms and parking lots! Not for recording every waking moment of your life.)
serraphin

Someone purporting to be a student at the school has posted on the Guardian link. Saying its a) Oldish news (though I’d still not heard it, and I work in education) and also that b) It wasn’t quite as mass walk out as suggested.

One of the arguments is still very well put forward though.
Chevan

My university has cameras in every room that take a snapshot every thirty seconds.

I really don’t care.
n3hima

Haha this is amazing — I didn’t realise that “the youth of today” (including myself) could actually be summoned to care about issues such as this… there are cameras in the sodding toilets at my school, nobody did anything about it, they also have a fingerprint reader in the library if you want to take out a book :(.

Good job I’m going somewhere else for AS Levels next year (although I’ve heard they have RFID student ID cards there to take out library books + buy lunch etc.)
Quiet Noises

It was always my father’s single dream to have the ability see have a video of the entirety of my average childhood day, just to see how I live and grow.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what he had in mind.
mackenzi

I’ve wanted to be a star since I was 5 years old. I think it’s great to give kids a chance at becoming camera/Internet stars at a young age. Hey, if they can’t take the big time, they’ll just drop out of school.
Precarious Loaf

@#6 Bill Gates does make the suggestion to take video in a classroom, but regardless of the merits of that suggestion, he never suggests to install such a system without agreement between all those being surveiled.
Anonymous

why doesn’t someone post, or repost a link or article on how to build simple and effective methods to *theoretically* disable, jam, or monkeywrench these kinds of cameras…I for one would be very happy to have that kind of info. if they are partially wireless, it would seem they are extremely easy to disable.
asuffield

Security cameras are necessary for large, unsupervised areas like hallways and lunchrooms

Wait, what?
Anonymous

What we need are cameras & GPS on all government employees 24/7…

To you know, protect them.
Anonymous

I respect those schoolkids for having the courage to make this kind of statement about their school’s mistake.
tensor

@33: I was thinking along those lines too. Students being able to relive the classes they felt they need as a refresher for a test. OR catching up if they were absent… Also giving parents the access to audit the quality of the classes.

I don’t recall if it was here or in /. a post a few weeks ago about how hard it was for a school to fire an incompetent teacher, and how hard it was to prove him/her as an incompetent.

Still being a privacy nut any kind of CCTV system bothers me, specially now that we live in a time where “indefinite” storage of this footage is essentially free (less than USD 100 per Tb is free in my book)
jccalhoun

That’s great that the students did this but what about the teachers? They were all fine with it?

As a former high school teacher I wouldn’t put up with cameras in my classroom. I would have put a coat over the camera or aimed it at the ceiling.
Orpheus84

@ #2 PKP – The headmaster’s quoted as saying the protesters are from the sixth form, which means they’ll be between the ages of 16-18.

On a side note, didn’t I read something about this in that book ‘Little Brother’?!

So when is the RFID tagging of everyone going to happen? Or is that what oyster cards are all about?
mackenzi

Texting devices can be allowed in a system like this so that viewers can help the students with their assignments and donate money to a favorite for scholarships and cars. Also, students who look around or sleep or smoke can be quickly reprimanded with a simple texted message. Firewire could be installed. But then, this all reminds me of “Big Brother.”
Anonymous

There are a lot of problems. CCTV seems to offer the solution as it can catch them at it. Is it really the answer? No! Why not? Reduction of civil liberties. Big brother is a bigger problem than most of us realise.

We should concentrate on instilling values and behaviour which is socially acceptable. Our governments should prevent the causes of anti-social behaviour and bad teaching etc. rather than try to ‘fix’ it after it is too late.

Maybe it really is too late and we’re all doomed!
ral8158

Asuffield: My school’s lunch room had a huge vandalism problem during the non-lunch periods–all boy’s school, boys will be boys–and the installation of cameras there turned our commons from the larger equivalent of a bathroom stall to a very nice area. I actually had a conversation with the associate principle after the installation–the videos were discarded after a week and only accessed if there was a need to investigate property damage or theft or some kind of dispute between students. Parking lots–likewise, people would steal things out of cars or get into accidents with parked cars and leave. Both places are places you have the option not to be. (I guess not for lunch, but most people ate in five minutes and left anyway) I included hallways to try to completely illustrate the difference between Wareagle’s experience and this surveillence, but on reconsideration I really would not approve of hallway recording, I just misspoke.
Lucifer

All of Europe laid down when tyranny swept through the land except for England. It was true in the 40s and it’s becoming true once again now.
Churchill would be proud.

I would not want to grow up in classrooms with a camera lens and a little red LED light above me. The act of being observed by some unseen audience is creepy beyond belief. It devalues the authority of the teacher in that classroom, it makes the children more paranoid, and it is an expenditure of resources that has no pedagogical value whatsoever.
Anonymous

it would make more sense to have a 100% voucher system and let kids and families decide where they want to go to school.

in a dysfunctional highly controlled required single government school, kids act out. It is a fact. They steal vandalize, harass both teacher and other students and sometimes are violent. thus the cameras. but the real answer is market demand for choosing between different education providers. make no mistake, though. in the present age, some kids are abusive, with the influence of vacant violent tv, video games, and crap food, kids will vandalize a classroom. fact.
ijostl

Ok so let’s give everyone access to every camera, that way we could all see who is really doing what.
Anonymous

One of the comments on the original article linked above had a throwaway aside about how this wasn’t handled well but the fingerprinting certainly has made the lunch process work better. WHAT? Does anyone know what they do with that data? Is it destroyed when the year is over? Really really destroyed? Sheesh.
arkizzle

PTSD,

go back to bed, you seem to have gotten up on the wrong side this morning.
Felix Mitchell

Publically available footage of lessons doesn’t seem like a good idea. It would undermine the teacher’s authority, which is necessary for teaching.
AlexG55

As far as I know, fingerprint readers like some libraries have don’t store your actual fingerprints. They store a set of numbers which is generated in a certain way from a given fingerprint- but it’s impossible to reconstruct the fingerprint given only the numbers.This is also true of the fingerprint security devices on laptops.
billy68

Looks very possible that the comments on the original article defending the system were written by staff from the school… nevermind that the language is barmy (‘The parent who is complaining about the cameras’, ‘us “independent” teenagers!’). just wonder why ‘user_999′ posted at 12.56pm on a tuesday and ‘student1234′ at 10.15am on a thursday morning. surely those pesky kids don’t have unauthorised net access during class, not with all those cameras…
Anonymous

I wish we had had cameras in our classrooms when I was in school! The bullies would taunt the good kids when the teacher’s back was turned just so we would strike back and get in trouble when the teachers thought we were the aggressors!
And all the kids cheating when some of us were honestly taking tests. Maybe there would have been some real justice.

And today, with all the kids texting answers and doing other crap in classes, they need to be monitored. Teachers need tools in their arsenal at least as powerful as the kids carry in their bags.

That said, if you’re worried about long term civil liberties, just make it a rule that it’s a self-overwriting system every day so there’s no permanent record. If people need to use the recording, do it immediately.
olimax

Don’t know about anyone else but I get ads for CCTV on the top of the page. Class..
Anonymous

It’s exam season BILLY68. Sixth formers will off from school if they don’t have any exams.
Anonymous

By constantly harvesting ammunition on people to be used against them in the future, we don’t ensure their good behaviour. Rather, we take away their ability or desire to learn from their own mistakes. Best case scenario: a classroom where children are intimidated into behaving, rather than learning through experience and behaving well of their own free will. These scare tactics are becoming the bedrock of our society. See: the right to free protest.

will
hbl

@#6 – hey great video from TED. I need to get more involved in that particular resource. It also served to remind me what a fantastic and persuasive orater Bill Gates is… people always compare him to Steve Jobs, but as exciting as it is to watch his keynotes, all he’s doing is trotting out sales figures and unveiling shiny new toys. Bill Gates is trying to save the friggin’ world, dagnammit!!!