Big Brother Monitoring Won't Alienate Anyone, Will It?

Greetings Comrades, there are exciting proposals that will lead to a revolution in how we raise our children. The government is proposing a database that will track all children from birth in England and Wales. The database will contain a rich assortment of data about children; from "how they are doing in class to whether they are eating enough fruit and veg".

These proposals are nothing like the punitive overtones of the recent Supernanny Initiative. They will form part of a Brave New World in which we will fit children with RFID chips, in-built cameras that will let us know how they interact with their environment and authority figures, and in vivo monitoring that will let us know what they are eating. Repeated failure to achieve the 5 a day target will trigger a reminder text.

Ignoring the fact that this proposal is monumentally unworkable, as should be apparent to anyone who has followed the NHS IT fiasco, what were the proposers of this scheme thinking? Or weren't they? Read Shinga's Since When Have Bureaucracy And Databases Been Synonyms For 'Solution' on this scheme. I will add that there is a lot of evidence that alienation from the environment or social system in which one lives is frequently cited as a factor in depression and anxiety. So, having your children monitored from birth isn't going to unsettle or alienate anyone, is it? It isn't possible that this bold social policy will result in greater levels of depression or mental illness?

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project