Surveillance Schooling

Almost twenty years ago, a New York City teacher named John Taylor Gatto published a bitter denunciation of public schools. As a teacher, Gatto wrote, he taught his students seven things that were never identified in the curriculum. The seventh lesson was that students could not expect to develop a private self in any significant way, since"each is under constant surveillance" by school officials.

I thought about Gatto this week as I read news stories on the astounding legal case of Savana Redding, who at the age of thirteen was strip-searched by school officials on the hunt for some Advil. I don't have much time, so this has to be a quick post, but it struck me as I read news coverage of the case this week that none of the stories had anything to say about the idea of privacy in the context of the history of compulsory public education. (Neither, it seems, did the legal argument in the case.)

But the assault on privacy and personal agency is as old as the idea of public schooling. In his essay"On the Mode of Education proper in a Republic," Benjamin Rush wrote,"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property."

It seems to me that Savana Redding's trip to the school office, and the years of courtroom argument that followed, have a clear historical context. She is being taught that she does not belong to herself, but that she is public property.

It would be interesting to hear from a historian of public education.