Delhi government's plan of parents monitoring students with CCTVs is disastrous
Government schools in Delhi may have CCTV cameras in each classroom, the feed of which will be accessible to parents on their phones.
Soon, government schools in Delhi may have CCTV cameras in each classroom, the feed of which will be accessible to parents on their phones. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted this on January 17, claiming the measure will make children safer and the system “transparent and accountable”.
Reviewed the progress of installation of CCTV cameras in each class in all govt schools. Each parent will be given access to see his child studying in class on realtime basis on his phone. This will make the whole system transparent and accountable. It will ensure safety of kids
— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) January 17, 2018
The Kejriwal government has to its credit some commendable work in improving the lot of state-run schools in Delhi. The latest move, however, is an overkill, with potentially disastrous consequences.
There are operational and financial problems in the plan – government schools normally have students from economically disadvantaged groups, and the government is assuming all their parents have smartphones. Several of these schools are struggling for basic infrastructure – adequate number of classrooms, playing areas, taps in toilets. Offering CCTV cover to such schools is more than a little Mary Antoinette-esque.
However, far more worrisome is the total violation of privacy it will mean for both students and teachers, and the dilution of accountability such a “shared responsibility” it is bound to result into.
If parents are watching their children every second, what does it do to the authority of the teacher? If everyone has access to the CCTV feed, how can schools alone be held accountable for what transpires inside classrooms?
The arguments in favour of the move are that it will force teachers to buck up and keep students safer. Also, students and teachers, if they are doing nothing wrong, should have nothing to hide from concerned parents.
However, keeping things from parents is not about secrecy, it is about privacy. It is about children’s, and specially adolescents’, right to have a life independent from their guardians, about them having the choice to decide how much to share with these guardians.
Also, a far simpler and less intrusive way to keep children safe is human monitoring – stationing supervisors, teachers, ayahs in classes, corridors and toilets.
Violation of teachers’ privacy
Under the new system, parents will be able to watch the camera feed through an app on their phones. In its infinite wisdom, the Delhi government has decided to install a complaint feature too: a report in Hindustan Times quotes an official as saying: “If parents spot anything wrong and want to complain, then they can use the app to register it. The issue will be addressed by officials from the department concerned.”
Increasingly, teachers are speaking out about interference by “helicopter parents”, who feel the need to monitor and participate in every aspect of their children’s lives at school, and who take an adversarial position with respect to the school in the job of bringing up a child.
Picture this: Zealous parents are tracking the education their children are receiving in school. Two students fight, the teacher reprimands or punishes them. What is to stop the parents, now armed with the complaint feature, perceive injustice to their children and immediately “register the issue”?
Also, “good teaching” is essentially subjective. What may be perfectly acceptable teaching methods for some parents might seem inadequate to others, who might feel the urge to “report” the teachers.
Of course, there are instances of teachers shirking work, bullying students, or targeting some children in particular, especially in government schools where students are from lower economic strata. All of these are reprehensible, and need to be curbed. However, the solution is not to put teachers in a Bigg Boss-style house.
A more effective strategy would be for the school principal, senior teachers or even education department officials to conduct inspections, sit through classes selected randomly. While this will mean accountability and responsibility, it won’t have the teachers constantly looking over their shoulders, which can be counter-productive.
Teachers conscious of thoroughly non-objective viewers watching their every step are more likely to focus on being “right” and staying out of trouble, than on keeping order in class and trying innovative methods to teach.
Enrolling your child in a school involves some modicum of trust on the school – at some point, you need to withdraw and let the school do its job. Constant interference by parents will mean split jurisdictions, and a tug of war between parents and schools will not help children.
Violation of students’ privacy
The biggest drawback of the move, however, is the utter and absolute violation of children’s privacy it will mean. Indian society in general does not grasp the concept of privacy very well, as evident during the recent Aadhaar hearings. Children often share sleeping areas with siblings or even parents, and shutting doors except while changing clothes is frowned upon.
Also, in India, generation gap is likely to mean a huge difference in the idea of “acceptable” to parents and children.
In this milieu, schools are often the only places where children get to be themselves, where they can express and explore their personalities in the company of their peers. A lot of who we are as people is not what our parents or some other adult taught us, it is what we learnt outside their sphere of influence.
Knowing that a parent – their own and their classmates’ – is constantly watching them will mean children will never think independently of them, and will restrict the expression of their personalities. Such constant presence of adults can contribute to a feeling of “learned helplessness” among students, and have them grow up believing that such monitoring is normal and acceptable.
Children often don’t take school problems home, preferring to solve them on their own, sowing the first seeds of independence and control on their lives. If a parent is aware of the problem anyway, the sense of school being “their space” is taken away from children.
Also, if children know that their guardians are monitoring their interaction with their teachers, not only is the teacher’s authority compromised, the children are unable to form meaningful relationships with other adults. A lot of us have experiences of teachers being guides we could turn to when we felt misunderstood – rightly or wrongly – by our parents. A parent potentially watching over all student-teacher interactions will make such bonds impossible.
Most importantly, snooping is not the way to keep a child safe. Parents watching live telecast of classroom proceedings may deter bullying and unruly conduct, but it will also mean an end to simple rites of passage into adulthood – innocent classroom romances, a fight with a bully, having a friend’s tiffin on the back benches, sharing a joke in a boring class. Fond memories of school life are often made up of incidents authority figures would thoroughly disapprove of.
If children are keeping things from parents, they probably have good reason to, fearing punishment, ridicule, or just disappointing the adults. They way to bridge this gap is through winning a child’s trust and better communication, not technical surveillance.
Denied privacy, children will resort to hiding. If monitored in school, they will conduct what are nothing more than normal growing-up activities outside the campus, in potentially more unsafe spaces.
When a child chooses to confide in an adult, it is an expression of trust, something that makes their bond stronger. Parents having automatic access to the details of children’s lives will take away this choice, and rob both the parent and the child of a bonding experience.
There are other ways to boost security
As stated earlier, human presence is a far more effective and much less intrusive way of keeping children safe in schools. The presence of a teacher in a corridor during lunch hours can prevent incidents of bullying, without making the details of students’ conversations available to parents or other authority figures.
CCTV cameras give the impression that the school administration – in this case the Delhi government – and the parents trust neither teachers not students.
A machine can be a deterrent before a problem starts, or serve as repository of evidence after it has occurred. A human can actually intervene in a fight that has started, in some harassment taking place.
The three horrific crimes that rocked Delhi schools recently – 7-year-old Pradyuman Thakur’s murder in Gurgaon, the rape of a 4-year-old allegedly by a classmate in Dwarka, and the rape of a 5-year-old in an East Delhi school – all took place when the children had been left unattended in classrooms and toilets.
Also, this sharing of responsibility will make it more difficult to pin accountability in case something untoward were to occur. School administrations can easily argue that parents too had all access to the activities of their children, and hence blame cannot be put on the school alone.
Parents might be okay with monitoring the activities of their children in class. Will they be equally at ease with many strangers – guardians of other students – having the same access to their child?
Paedophiles do not operate in a vacuum. The feed from the cameras being transmitted to so many phones will be scarily prone to misuse.
If a private school installs cameras in all its classrooms, parents can decide whether or not to enroll their children there. Government schools have a large number of students for whom the institute was the only choice.
The Delhi government has so far not announced a time frame by which all the schools will get this new special security feature. Hopefully, better sense will prevail and schools will not be turned into mini-surveillance states.