The Inevitable Outcome of Socialized Parenting...Er, "Education"

First off, I was home schooled, K through 12. It was a wonderful experience, but not the topic of this post. Being raised outside of the public school system, I often see it with "new eyes" and not a little suspicion. The idea that a central authority could trump my parents bothers me. It all comes down what I call unalienable responsibility. Much like unalienable rights, there are some responsibilities that cannot be subsumed by society, government, or other third parties. Parenting is one of those unalienable responsibilities; you can succeed and you can fail, but you cannot change the fact that you fathered or mothered a child. 

In contrast, some aspects of parenting are inalienable responsibilities. Education is one of them. While people can give up such responsibilities, they still cannot be taken. 

That is why socialized education bothers me, fundamentally. It isn't evil, it's just too easy to expand and appropriate inalienable rights to evil ends—for seemingly righteous reasons!

I do not believe that socialism is evil. I do believe that socialism should be severely limited to local, individually voluntary situations. That is why most socialist movements are bad; they are too broad, to inclusive and too involuntary.

With that in mind, consider this hot news story about socialist intrusion into the privacy of home life.

On November 11th, 2009, a high school student was called into the assistant principles office and disciplined for "inappropriate behavior in his home". As evidence, the assistant principle produced a photo taken by the webcam of a school laptop the student had taken home. These school laptops are assigned to students for use at home as part of a school computing initiative. If a student can't afford their own laptop, the school provides one.

These school-owned laptops are equipped with security software that tries to gather information about the computers whereabouts, when activated. Ideally, this would help locate a stolen laptop. Among other things, the software activates the computer's webcam, takes one or more pictures and sends them back to "home base".

I don't see any inherent problem with this setup, within a narrow use case of laptop theft. In this case, a student was "disciplined" for an undisclosed "behavior". That's all we have to go on. This lack of facts has fanned the speculation flame to an inferno!

If the laptop was not stolen, then this could be wrong on so many levels. I'm not sure where to start! Just think about this case for a while. Most people are ready to skin the principle, the school district and school board alive. That was my first reaction too, even though I highly doubt they had evil intentions for this technological capability. Eventually, as I read more from the school's side of the story, I just felt sad about the supercilious nature of socialized education.

School teachers and administrators are not parents! The reason they can even begin to presume so is because parents gave up the inalienable right to educate their own children in the first place!

Cory Doctorow reported the originally story two days ago through BoingBoing.com. Reading through comments on the various news stories was even more enlightening. The majority of people want heads to roll. Some raise accusations of child pornography or pedophilia. Others are are demanding that everyone read "Little Brother", by Cory Doctorow (available for free) and wake up to the new reality of covert surveillance.

Incidentally, Little Brother looks like an interesting (and quick) read. The parallel to Orwell's "Big Brother" is obvious and I'll certainly read it now, thanks to this article.

So, back to my original point. Are schools the new parents? Can anyone, however purely intentioned, take that right? No. But we have been duped into giving that right up anyway. That is the insidious danger of socializing movements, that they can't stop themselves once individual morality and responsibility are ceded to the organization. Responsibilities are interconnected. They cannot be divided and sub-divided with impunity.

This is why I fear socialized medicine. It can't remain benign for long.

I see an obvious parallel to cellular replication and cancer. When cells divide, they have to self-regulate carefully. Cells work together to regulate when they have reproduced enough and then stop. Cancerous cells ignore the stop signals and continuously divide until they destroy the system they depend on, and themselves. I think of this as cellular selfishness.

People in society are not that different from cells in an organism. Our responsibility is to be honorable, charitable, and selfless. When that is ignored, suffering is inevitable. Society needs some structure and common rules as a check to selfish behaviors. However, the degree to which laws exist, people have failed in their own responsibilities. They have failed to "govern themselves." Eventually, we all have to suffer the consequences of not helping each other self-regulate better through persuasion and long-suffering.

Individual responsibilities are immutable. They are also horrific and painful. Honestly, they cannot be removed without neutering the deity within each of us.

So what to do? Take your own responsibilities seriously. And teach others the same principle. Praise responsibility. Cherish it. And please, teach your own children this principle. It's your responsibility.