The front page of the Daily Mail carries a remarkable story today - pupils from the age of five upwards are to be entered on a Government "hate register" by teachers for playground taunts.
Big Brother Watch has a scepticism of databases per se but this one really takes the biscuit. As per the Mail,
Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school 'hate registers' over everyday playground insults.
Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school.
As usual with these disgraceful things, the scheme didn't emerge through an announcement or consultation or, heaven forbid, legislation - that would be too honest and open - it emerged when the first family of victims to have found out that their child was on such a register spoke out about it.
As the Mail says in an editorial,
Instead of being gently informed the words they are using (which most are too young to understand) are inappropriate or unkind, they are being placed on school 'hate registers' and formally reported to the Town Hall Stasi.
Thus, a 10-year-old's taunt may haunt him in later life.
This is the ultimate extension of the movement in education from the "short sharp shock" school of punishment to stigmatising young people for weeks, months, terms or even years for their behaviour, never allowing children to put their naughtiness behind them as they grow up - coupled with the enforcement of a political correctness agenda by the state, onto people at an age at which it thinks it can stamp its own worldview.
It is quite wrong.