Slippery, Becoming Steep

YOU CAN SEE, (oh oh say), on the face of it, why a big public high school in suburban chicago, or anywhere in america for that matter, might want to monitor the activity on its students online. Considering the importance of the internet in our lives nowadays, and all. Consider this: as you know, a high school, any high school, is a social center, with all kinds of friendships, relationships, groups, sub groups, and all manner of social activity, merely because of having several hundred people in the same building at the same time. The internet is the same thing, with "cyber space" replacing brick and mortar. It seems that bullying is a worse problem in school now than ever before, just by listening to the commercials opposing it. Bullying in the hallways can be magnified on the internet, same people, same issues. The internet can, and probably usually is, a mirror image of good old town high school. Also, of course, students have the potential of slandering teachers and administrators online, though it remains very uncertain exactly what anybody can do to stop it. Then, of course, there's the pornography aspect of it, even though, once again, its very very nebulous exactly what a school can do to control, let alone monitor the sexual behavior of perfectly norma, healrhy sixteen year olds with cars and I phones and parents. But a big suburban shicago high school is inedd monitoring the online activiey of its students, and how they do it, (just type every student's name into google?), what they come up with, how many other schools eventually start doing it, and what the unintended consequences are remains to be seen. For indeed, there shall be unintended consequences. There always are. And so it turns out that the united states government not only can and does monitor all phone calls and emails within these united states;it spies on brazil as well. And how many others? (Brazil caught us, and they aint happy). And the public schools are starting to spy on their students. This slippery slope could become quite steep.