To fight this, I don't think we should be talking about privacy or rights. That's all very important, but society is already fairly desensitized to that language, and the pro-surveillance side can literally point to the dead bodies of real children.
Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.
<sarcasm>
"Well, if by 'increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior' you mean 'not molesting the girls and refraining from committing school shootings' then maybe they should have systems like this!" </sarcasm>
You need to have some arguments not centered around the idea of behavior. Because that idea will be thrown back at you almost immediately. Behavior is exactly what these people will say they are trying to change.
From some distance it looks to me like kids today are aren't exhibiting the same behavior as their parents. Their parents were oh so much much worse behaved.
>they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.
Wait, I thought that was school in a nutshell already. :D That's certainly all it did for me until I hit college.
My solution is generally to apply the same rules to the people enforcing the rules. Drug test students? Drug test the administration, superintendents, board of education, etc...
The issue is that this indoctrinates children into living in a totalitarian state. If you never have any freedom as a child, how will you know it's missing as an adult?
> Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children.
I think we should skip logic and go for the emotional "what happens when a pedophile get's this information" argument. There's certainly enough truth to it, a pedophile having that sort of surveillance data could do all sorts of psychological manipulation, even getting access to the schools database would do it.
Instead, we should be talking about how deleterious it is to the character development of our children. Among other problems, they are being demanded to conform to an increasingly narrow range of acceptable behavior, and conditioned to develop about as unhealthy a relationship with authority figures as possible.