My granddaughter is currently on holidays from school. She started in January at a private school that shall remain unnamed. On her final day of school, she received her report and a copy of the school's yearbook. Nothing unusual about that. A closer look at the yearbook however, shows photos of all the children, their full names and the names of their mothers and fathers, the children's dates of birth, complete addresses and telephone numbers (handwritten by the children themselves).
Now this is a country where kidnappings of students for ransom money is on the increase and initiatives like this just make the kidnapper's job easier. It could be argued that the yearbook only goes to the students and their parents but the reality is that it would have gone off to the printer first where many people would have had an opportunity to peruse the contents. In addition, yearbooks are often just put down somewhere and can easily go missing. As far as I know, there was no consultation with parents about whether they wanted these details disclosed in the yearbook. The privacy issue here is that the information originally supplied by the parents to the school should have been used for administrative purposes only and not serve as content for a yearbook.
What were the staff at the school thinking when they got these children (four years old and upwards) to handwrite this personal information onto a sheet of lined paper that was then scanned and attached to their photographs? Clearly they weren't thinking at all. Amazingly, I don't think any of the parents have complained about the issue. The culture here is to just accept these things and not make trouble. Educational commonsense is not in plentiful supply in Indonesian schools and that's not going to change anytime soon because NOBODY COMPLAINS!
No comments:
Post a Comment