barcoding kids (for real!)

John Dewey might have said school is a factory.

Now, we get to say school is a Walmart stockroom.

Thanks to the forward thinking engineers at the National Institute of Justice, public schools are already piloting programs where students wear or carry a tag that uniquely identifies them using radio frequency identification technology. This technology allows real-time location tracking of whatever is attached the device, which according to the NIJ, somehow or another can improve school safety.

This from a government that wants to give the appearence of supporting small schools, instead we're taking the superstore approach the reducing shrinkage. Beneath the unfunded rhetoric of NCLB, grant money is being offered to schools that will agree to testing military-industrial technology on public school students. In an article for the New Standard, Catherine Komp presents the criticism that this is a means to acclamate students to high-tech surveillance.

Treating our children like volatile inventory is a means to continue decrease the dignity and humanity of young people. When kids are systematically made to feel worthless, they will not grow to be critical thinkers, active citizens or innovaters. Exactly the kinds of adults that corporations would love to employ, right? Folks who are easily intimidated into becoming by-the-book workaholics. And, of course, for the tracked children who are residents of marginalized communities, this is advanced preperation for what all ready goes on in prisons.

Can cash-strapped school systems resist the call of NIJ grant money? Or will children begin to find it normal that Big Brother is embedded into their trendy plastic bracelets?