School Surveillance Is Criminalizing Speech

Somewhere along the way, American schools decided the biggest threat to education wasn’t funding cuts, overstuffed classrooms, or a testing regime that’s turned learning into a factory line. No, the real menace, apparently, is the teenager with a Chromebook.

The pitch is simple: let software read every thought kids accidentally type, and maybe it will stop the next headline-grabbing tragedy. Parents are told this is about safety. Administrators are told this is about liability. What it actually creates is an educational system where the kid who types “kill me now” because they bombed a math test might suddenly be flagged as a national security concern.

Modern school surveillance isn’t your grandmother’s web filter. Today’s systems scrape through private emails, documents, chat logs, and search histories, raising alarms whenever their programmed dictionaries trip over a word. Context doesn’t matter. Sarcasm doesn’t matter. The fact that teenagers mostly communicate in irony and melodrama doesn’t matter. The software isn’t built to understand, only to report. The fallout is dumped onto school administrators, and sometimes, the cops.

The result is predictable: kids face disciplinary hearings because a bot thinks they’re plotting an uprising, when in reality they’re venting about cafeteria food. But hey, the software caught it, so someone has to be punished.

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