Click here for a newspaper clip of this article.
Picture a seemingly endless line of children, all dressed in the same clothes, the same muted tones — shuffling silently toward a single cashier as dollops of food are plopped in segments on their identical gray plastic trays.
Now, as they reach the cash register, they scan their fingerprint across a keypad, one child filing after the next, and then exit without a word as the “cashier” watches.
Some pessimistic vision of a children’s prison in a dreary futuristic novel? Hardly. It’s a scene that plays out daily at elementary schools across the country, as children barely old enough to comprehend the process they’re going through are filed and categorized through a system increasingly designed for standardization.
The hottest new craze sweeping the country is paying for lunch with one’s fingerprints. And the worst part is, it’s most common among our youngest students — grade schoolers, particularly first-graders. It’s because that’s where such a process serves the most practical use.
Many younger children have trouble remembering the seven-digit pass code they need to pay for their lunch, which is currently the industry’s standard method. Eliminating the code eliminates slow lines, for what that’s worth.
But like school uniforms, fingerprinting is a system designed for speed, and meant to discourage as much potential disruption as possible. And also like uniforms, it’s due to the actions of a few that the many are caused to miss out.
Uniforms strip students of valuable chances to express their individuality in the one place they have it left — the way they dress. Granted, in some school systems — particularly in urban areas — attire associated with gang activity is a legitimate concern.
But the point remains that these are often just a few unfortunate instances, and it always leads to a loathsome brand of knee-jerk authoritarianism, which is so unique to people happily in control of a group as powerless as school children.
So instead of educating the few who choose not to follow the rules, and helping them to come to a happy landing in their still-developing personalities, school boards often choose to institute a blanket rule and forget that there was ever a problem.
Nevermind the specific children with behavior problems, who learn nothing more from the experience than the painful lesson that rebelling against conformity only results in leaders caring even less about what they do or who they are.
Far be it from me to suggest that schools should be a place for learning, growth and development, but it certainly occurred to me more than once during my childhood that the best thing one gets out of public education is life lessons — those instances where you learn how to interact with other people, how to handle adversity, and the indelible value of diversity, of both culture and opinion.
So when I read a report about the growing popularity of fingerprint scanning in grade schools — under the guise of helping children who can’t write down or remember a seven-digit number — my radar goes up.
Ostensibly, the issue is that these ID codes have to be looked up using — gasp — the student’s own name whenever they’re forgotten, and that slows down the line for everyone.
I’m all for speedy lunches, but what’s wrong with a young student having to ask the lunch lady for a little help? This is how life works. We make mistakes, we need help, and yes, we must wait in long lines. Often.
When I was in grade school, I walked through the line every day with a dollar and five cents in my pocket, and I handed it to the nice lunch lady, who smiled and even chatted some as she worked the bulky machinery of the cash register.
And yes, I was one of the privileged few. I often had an extra quarter in my pocket to get a second chocolate milk.
But what was most important to me was the interaction with a human being as I paid, in a real-life economic situation. Until I was 15 years old, that was pretty much the only experience I had paying for something, on my own, as I would in real life.
And in a time when we’re seriously discussing the pros and cons of wiretapping America’s phones to keep us safe, it’s not unreasonable to ask the tough privacy-related questions associated with automatically cataloging our children in a government system which is prone to rabid paranoia.
But I believe there’s something more likely to be lost than our privacy when we start sacrificing it for comfort. We lose our humanity.
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43 Responses
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I’m gonna keep checking your blog = )
This is such a great piece. I love the imagery at the beginning. Its like a scene out of some horrible movie, like you say. But its in real life! heh.
We should know better. I never thought about learning to pay for stuff from the lunch line all those years. That’s a good point. Anyway keep up the good work!
scary.
Seriously good stuff
I usually don’t have a lot to say about political stuff, but this really gets under my skin.
You just cannot take ANY potential influence on children lightly, you just can’t. I don’t get it. Just some government buearucratic crap that they do wanting to make stuff easier when they destroy lives instead.
out.
I dunno.
I mean, I get the fingerprint thing being all scary and futuristic, but at the same time it just seems like something to make the world a little easier. Hardly anyone pays with cash these days but no one talked about the end of society when the debit card caught on.
chelsea,
I don’t think it’s the same thing. It’s not just the end of society, its just another example of a system where humanity is going away. Casey talks a lot about uniforms being another, more visible example of the same trend: catalogue, don’t educate.
And remember the title of the column is called “The Privacy Debate.” It’s more about being forced into a system that could have dangerous ulterior effects on your life. Kids in school don’t have a choice about whether or not this more “convenient” system is right or safe for them. The parents just barely have a voice through the school boards, which never listen to the voting public anyway.
So I think there’s more to be discussed here than whether or not making life “a little easier” is all there is to it.
great article. I hadn’t heard about this, but then I saw an article in Newsweek, too.
this was in today’s paper, I did a google search to find out more about the fingerprint systems and this was one of the first sites on the list, lol.
“Uniforms strip students of valuable chances to express their individuality in the one place they have it left — the way they dress.”
Hells yes
I don’t think most schools have this sort of system in place. It’s strange to say, but I don’t think it’s even an issue, in terms of national privacy or whatever, until the majority of american kids are in whatever system you’re talking about.
Until then, it’s just one way out of ten that kids pay for their lunches.
I guess that’s why it’s called the privacy DEBATE, huh?
lol @ the part about having extra money for milk. god i miss chocolate milk.
See, this is why I don’t want kids. The future’s just too fucked.
Oh c’mon, no kids over this? Try no kids over Global Warming.
This is a good one. Just wanted to leave a note to say that I love your columns!
Nice, clean site. I still have to read most of your columns lol
Really makes ya think, this stuff.
Even when I read the big papers like the Tribune and stuff, it’s so obvious that the columnists don’t put much effort into their work. It’s all about keeping things short and stupid. This reads like a good magazine article, I love it.
You should video blog on youtube. People would love it.
YouTube Vlogging! It’s the craze of the next century.
You should be in my high school paper.
Everyone needs to know about this stuff when it happens. When we switched to a ID number system in like junior high, I knew something was wrong with it. Now I know. My school’s talking about uniforms, too. They always do that, though, and they never do. We’re in the suburbs. Too much money in the system to make kids only buy one pair of clothes each day.
This is probably the best column of the ones listed here.
I like the Colbert one.
Great job. So interesting to read things you had no idea were going on.
Need to get some digg up in here.
Dude you should cross post some of this stuff on DailyKos.com
Nah, Dkos doesn’t like straight up opinion pieces. They like factoidal news articles that they can make their own opinions about.
Kos would like this stuff, but you have to write for the times to get noticed there.
PRIVACY is chief among all things. Privacy is just another word for freedom.
The amount of privacy we have as citizens is directly proportional to the amount of freedom we have.
good one.
Get this column in my paper–didn’t know you had a website!
NYT should have this.
Digg/Dugg.
Cheers
Honestly, you can’t mess with the children.
This isn’t a big deal. At. All.
They do this at my school and it’s not even like this. We’re not all being raped by the government.
Speack for yourself.
I second the emotion.
Animal Farm was much better than 1984. And this column is best of all because it’s happening in real life.
Lots of stuff from 1984 was happening in Orwell’s real life, too.
Like talking donkeys.
I disagree with you. Indeed, I