Let's say you post something on your personal Twitter on a Sunday evening and you are at home, in your own clothes, on your own phone, using your own data, monday morning, you walk into school and your principal calls you in to talk about what you posted, how does that sit with you?
Because that is exactly what we are talking about there , when we discuss schools monitoring the social media of their staff and students, and I don't care how many good intentions you wrap around it, it is wrong, I understand the argument on the other side, I do, schools want to know if a teacher is out here posting problematic things, they want to catch a student who is silently struggling before it becomes a crisis, on paper, that sounds responsible, It even sounds caring, but good intentions do not cancel out a violation, and make no mistake, this is a violation.
Social media, for most people, is personal space, Yes, it is technically public, but there is a difference between something being accessible and something being actively surveilled, when a school decides to monitor what their staff and students post online, they are crossing into a part of people's lives that has nothing to do with them, the internet is not a school corridor, It is not a classroom, It does not fall under their jurisdiction and no law says it should.
Teachers are human beings with lives outside of their teaching jobs, students are people outside of their student ID numbers, both of them have the right to express themselves, vent, joke, and exist online without their school breathing down their neck about it,
And If a teacher posts an opinion about politics on their personal page, that is none of the school's business unless it directly disrupts the learning environment, if a student tweets something emotional at midnight, a school monitoring system is not the right or ethical way to address that.
And who exactly is doing this monitoring? who decides what crosses a line? these are real questions because once you give an institution that kind of access, you are also giving them the power to misuse it, teachers could be penalised for personal views that have nothing to do with their teaching ability, students could be disciplined for things said in what they believed was their own space, that is not a school protecting its community, that is a school controlling it.
If schools really care about their students mental health ,there are ways to help them, they can have counsellors, open door policies and ways for students to report problems anonymously these things respect the dignity of the people they are trying to help, If they are concerned about their staff they can use the hiring process, performance reviews and HR departments , Monitoring peoples media is not the answer.
It is also not an idea to teach students that it is okay for a school to watch what they do outside of school, this is not teaching them to be safe, It is teaching them to obey the school without question, that is not what education is supposed to be about.
A school's authority ends at the gate, what happens on the internet, on personal accounts, on personal time that belongs to the individual, not the institution.
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