Welcome to This Week in South Carolina I'm Gavin Jackson.

As we wrap up 2020, we focus on two top issues facing our country, education and privacy.

Our first guest Firmin DeBrabander who wrote a book called Life after Privacy.

We talk about that with him right now.

Professor, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

So your book takes a deep look at the state of our privacy in the modern era and how government and social media and business interests continue to know more and more about us.

Either were willingly give into these interests or we're unwillingly giving in to these interests.

But apparently, we seem to be somewhat fine with this all around.

So how much do these you know these entities know about us?

And do we even know what's going on with that data at this point?

They know a lot about us.

We have no idea what they know about us, but they know a lot.

And they know things that we can hardly even fathom such as the example, I discuss in my book where Target new customers were pregnant and in the second trimester of their pregnancy, no less.

They know if you're credit worthy on the basis of whether you buy felt pads to keep your furniture from scuffing the floor.

This is the kind of arcane esoteric knowledge they're looking for that they're skimming out of our data.

And they're able to collect this data from a variety of angles.

So, they know a lot that's for sure.

Is there, you know, is it known to us how much.

You said we don't know how much goes on there.

But are people, you know, seemingly okay with this?

It seems like we are to an extent but how, what are the feelings about this?

well that's where I go back and forth.

People - the general impression is that people tend to say that they do not like it.

And the word that comes up so often is that they find these kinds of invasions of privacy creepy.

On the other hand, people also seem to be more than willing to take part because of the kind of conveniences that these privacy invasions offer.

When Amazon knows so much about me, then the of amount of services they can offer grows exponentially.

Consumers, our digital economy is extremely fast paced and in this fast paced economy, people are very happy that our digital spies know this about us because of the service they can provide.

Yeah I mean that's definitely creepy when you can have Target, you know, knowing that if you buy what neo-natal vitamins that you're about to be pregnant, so we're going to start sending you coupons based on that.

It in- flamed some people and caused some issues.

But, I'm guessing just because there's some big blow ups in the news about certain events like this, it might get some traction, but it's still going on.

And people don't seem to worry about it because, "Hey, I'm getting a coupon and" "I am pregnant."

Well, I've also noticed the kind of generational divide you know my generation and older is really worried about these kinds of privacy invasions.

But I wrote the book because of my conversations with students and younger generations who seem very much more nonchalant about this.

They find this to be, you know, par for the course.

And this is just a fact of life in the digital economy.

You want to get stuff done, you have to share information, make your life an open book and in point of fact and I think rightfully so, the younger generation's quite resigned to this.

This stuff is known about us.

Our spies don't even need our data.

They can find everything about us through our, what is called our metadata, which is the data of our data, where we make our phone calls, when we make them.

Not what we're saying.

Not the content of our emails, but who they are to, what they look like, where we're buying stuff.

This is perfectly sufficient for our spies to know a lot about us.

And of course that metadata was at the center of you know the domestic surveillance program that was uncovered by Edward Snowden, very controversial all around there.

But that doesn't really seem to change the needle too much for how we felt about being snooped on.

I mean I think after that point, you're kind of beyond the looking glass and everyone's like "Okay, here we are.

It's happening!

What's the" "difference?

What should we be doing?"

Exactly!

This is where - This is how this book started.

I was so upset about how my students you know responded to the Edward Snowden event I thought, I'm going to write a book in defense of privacy.

After I researched more and talked with you know people more about it, I realized well I think that ship has sailed.

And I don't think the average you know digital consumer really cares as much.

So you asked what can we do?

Well, I'm very pessimistic but regulations I don't think privacy regulations will do much because the ones that have been proposed and the ones that have been enacted in Europe, they tend to put more power in the hands of individual consumers.

They try to give us more power to control our data.

But that seems an ill fated venture, because we don't really seem to care much about our data.

So, why give us more power?

Ultimately, I think as a political thinker, I'm thinking more in terms of what this means for our democracy, the way that we will retain control over and against these massive companies that have information against us is good old fashioned democracy.

We have to be out in the public sphere.

You know, building bonds, coordinating power that's how you stand up to these kind of entrenched interests.

We can't possibly do it as individual consumers behind our computer screens.

And I will say that you do mention that we don't really seem to have a grasp on understanding what data is really even being used.

And when you look at some of these congressional hearings, I don't think congressmen and women know either.

And it's kind of a fundamental mis- understanding when it's such a big business and you talk about one regulation that happened in the European Union the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, which had a ripple effect over here since so many multinational companies were affected by it.

So it seems like we're being governed somewhat secondarily in a way.

Well, the main reason I'm worried about the GDPR is because it kind of sets up an illusion of parity.

It sets up an illusion that we have control, when really we don't.

You know like I said, you can do all you can to protect your data, but it's the metadata they want As I indicate, I give an example in the book.

Facebook doesn't even need you to be a member to know about you.

They will find out about you through what are called shadow profiles.

They can find out about people who are not on Facebook, like my 87 year old dad.

They can find out.

They know a lot about him through other people.

And with two minutes left, Professor, I want to ask you, privacy is not a constitutional right.

You point this out very clearly.

But democracy is unthinkable without it and it's at the core condition of being a free person.

You write, "Are we heading toward" "a place where we are going to wake up one day" "and realize that, we've lost our voice in society" "and that we can't organize in private if we were to" "resist for some reason or another?"

Well, the point I actually make in the book is that it is not a very well known or articulated constitutional right.

It wasn't in the original documents at the founding of the nation.

It was articulated later.

But I also point out that, you know, it is taken for granted that a lot you know by political thinkers that democracy requires privacy, but that is not in fact the case.

The Civil Rights Movement, for example, which made great advances in the name of democracy, they had no privacy early on.

The Gay Rights Movement, no privacy.

The Labor Movement, no privacy.

How did they overcome that?

It took concerted organization and coordinated efforts in the street, in the public sphere.

Then with thirty seconds left, I want to ask you about being worried about, you know, giving your privacy away.

You have a interesting stat in there about 20 years ago one in sixteen people thought that the army rule, an army rule would be good, talking about totalitarianism essentially.

And now a few years later, it's about one in six people think that'll be a good idea.

Again, we're so far removed from these kind of regimes.

How worrisome is that and have we gone too far at this point?

Well I think that's another reason we need to get back into the public sphere.

At the end of the day, I argue it's not privacy we should be worrying about, its public life and public action.

That's where it has to happen.

That's where our political interests and our attention need to turn.

Cause that's how you really rebuff autocracy, not behind our computer screens as lone individuals.

Well, the good thing is we saw a really strong election where people did turn out and you know had their voices heard.

So, again if you love the movie, the documentary, The Social Dilemma, you're going to love the book Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society by Firmin DeBrabander who is a philosophy professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Thank you so much for joining us.

And joining me now is University of South Carolina School of Law Professor Derek Black.

He's discussing his new book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, which looks at the history of education in our country.

Professor, thanks for joining us.

Yeah thanks for having me on.

It's a pleasure.

So, I want to start off this is an all encompassing read.

It's very interesting.

It's very informative about public education in our country.

Predates the constitution and of course it's enshrined in our constitution.

And you kind of work through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Desegregation and now, what you describe as a really disastrous past decade.

I want to talk about all those eras in a moment, but tell me a little about how education is rooted in our democracy.

Yeah, well I mean ultimately the idea is that if you're going to have folks going to the ballot box and deciding how this country's going to be run, they need to have some level of education to make informed decisions.

And of course in today's world with so many different types of information coming out.

As some of which is reliable, some of which isn't.

It really a discerning and educated eye necessary to sort of cut through the morass and ultimately that is the protection of a functioning democracy.

Just how important was it when we look at the founding fathers to put that and make sure it was cemented in our constitution to have a public education, a right to public education in our country?

Yeah, I mean they were really worried at the outset.

I mean if you rewind back to the 1700s, this world was literally run by kings and queens.

You know regular folks did not have control of their own lives.

And the idea that they were going to take political power and hand it over to it to regular farmers and and folks like that was scary to a lot of the elites.

And so they believe that the only check against number one, you know the common people seizing their property and number two, the common people not being defraud at the ballot box was to make sure they were all educated.

And so the word was that public education is the surest guarantee of the preservation of liberty.

And so what they did at the founding was or right around that period after sort of developing that ideology, was to pass the northwest ordinance, which dictated that in all the land outside of the colonies the stuff that we call Ohio, Michigan, etcetera that every square inch of that land was carved up into squares and into little towns and the center the lot of every town was to be reserved for public education.

And about nine of the outer lying lots were to be reserved for generating resources for the public education.

It was there from the very beginning, this idea that we would build our nation around public education.

Then can we talk about the Civil War?

It seems like it was obviously a major factor for obviously so many reasons, but for education it seems like a pretty interesting turning point.

And you do have a pretty good nugget of South Carolina history here too when you mention the Battle of Port Royal in 1861, which is just down in Beaufort County and how land and schooling for former slaves became available on the sea islands.

So tell us about this history and the importance of you know this in South Carolina's past and you know the greater picture of education in the country, especially when you start looking at how this was almost a foundation for Briggs V. Elliott, which is one of the five cases for Brown versus Board of Education.

Yeah, I mean so part of the problem that initial idea of Congress about building the nation around schools was it only applied outside of the colonies and number two schools take more than land to run.

They ultimately need some money and in the south in particular, the money wasn't forthcoming nor was the system.

So in the south, public education effectively did not exist, even for middle and low income white folks.

Of course for African Americans, literacy was a crime in the South.

And so what a lot of what I talk about in the book, I didn't set out to write a book about South Carolina, but South Carolina really ends up being the center of the education experiment.

So that when the north wins Port Royal, the Battle of Port Royal here in South Carolina.

They turn over the sort of huge swath of land down in that area to African Americans who basically began running a self sufficient society.

And one of the very first things that they do is start to deliver education to themselves.

Missionaries within weeks sailed down from Boston and New York to begin teaching former slaves.

There was just an enormous eagerness that really overwhelmed everyone.

No one appreciated or expected how large the desire for public education would be and so these little schools in the middle of the Civil War began popping up all over the sea islands and folks start making their way from inland to the coast so that they can get access to this learning.

So you have the society sort of organically developing education.

Well of course once the Civil War is over, now we have to get to a more formal system and again, South Carolina plays a primary leading role.

And a lot of those folks from from Port Royal and St Helena's Island and Beaufort those folks, some of those become delegates to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868.

And so in that convention, they say what the founders had said, which is that public education is an absolute necessity for democracy to work.

And to be quite clear, it's absolutely necessary for a group of people who had, had all forms of learning denied to them throughout their lives.

And so that convention of 1868 adopts an education clause mandating a system of public schools throughout the state of South Carolina, mandating a tax system to pay for them.

And those two mandates in our South Carolina constitution remain with us to this day and form the backbone of the experiences that children across the state receive.

But South Carolina may have been one of the forerunners.

It wasn't the last, because Congress demanded that all the southern states, amend their state constitution before rejoining the union and that they all support education, they didn't name South Carolina, but support education and the same with the South Carolina was.

And so the south goes from a place where there is no education guaranteed to a place where there's a guarantee everywhere in the south and then the rest of the nation follows suit in the next decade or so.

So it really is a new revolutionary period that happens here and it starts in the south around public education.

But then Reconstruction happens, you know we're talking about compulsory education that requirement, things kind of hit pause a little bit too because it seems to advance segregation issues going forward.

Can you talk about how Reconstruction happened and then of course Jim Crow affecting you know that revolution we're talking about here for education?

Yeah, I mean Congress and African Americans understood and fully believed that the gateway to freedom, the gateway democracy was the ballot and the school house doors.

And those southern constitutions did both of those things, giving African Americans the right to vote and everyone the right to education.

But as Jim Crow began to rise in the late 1800s in Mississippi, for instance, they said, "we've come together," this in 1891 "for one reason and one reason only and that's to disenfranchise the Negro.

And when they did that, they did it in two ways.

One was to adopt various mechanisms to try to exclude African Americans from the ballot box and the other was to deny them equal access to education.

So they began segregating the schools and changing the tax structure of how we fund those schools.

So they could be both segregated and financially unequal.

Once you know Mississippi leads the way on that, the rest of the south follows.

So, we started with this sort of re-birth of democracy right in 1868 but by the late 1800s, there is a full scale agenda across the south to quash that movement and reduce African Americans to second class citizens.

And that's something that we're still dealing with the ramifications of course, as well, correct?

Yeah, I mean that there's a lot of legacy that continues from that period.

We still have, of course, plenty of racial segregation, regardless of whether it's by law or not.

We have continuing inequalities in education and the struggles over the ballot box.

So these stories are still with us.

And one of the things that I point out in the book and I have a map that sort of shows and color codes the nation.

But unfortunately when you look at the current privatization of education, or sort of the limits on fully meeting public education obligations, what you see is that privatization movement is strongest in those places with the highest level of minority citizens.

So when you look at places like South Carolina, you know, Alabama, Tennessee, sort of very significant privatization movements.

But when you move into places like West Virginia and North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, there is no privatization.

And so that's the other story that I tell there that there still seems to be this tension that is related to our history around delivering equal and adequate education to all.

Let's get into privatization of public schools too.

I mean you have, so many people over the years quoting your book, you know, touting the importance of this right to public education to educate the public, so people can self govern like you're talking about.

But then you go on to say towards the other book that the last decade aligns better with the darker periods of our history than the brighter ones.

Can you elaborate on that, what you mean by this darker period that we've been going through?

Yeah, so you take the long story of the book, it is this continual expansion of public education and the right to vote at the same time.

The right to vote never moves forward without sort of expansion of education.

We have a dark period and Jim Crow, but as I point out, ironically enough, even middle and low income whites had gotten enamored enough with the idea of public education that they said look, "We don't want to do away with this all together.

"We just want to restrict African American education."

Which is simply to say that racism was strong, but it wasn't strong enough to quash public education.

But now over the last decade, what we hear is a rhetoric and a set of policies that for the very first time in this nation's history is questioning the validity of public education itself, whether it be for poor whites or poor blacks or anyone else.

And we hear and have ideology arguing that we should do away with this public education system.

And I say, that's an enormous danger.

If this is a democracy that we built on the back of public education, we won't have that type of democracy in the future, if we throw away our commitment to public schools.

Yeah and you look at how you know tell me about these reform attempts.

You hear different states trying to do different things, different evaluations for teachers, which end up backfiring and then, you know driving teachers away or they try to blast these unions out then, again, fewer teachers want to be in the work force in those states.

Tell me a little bit about how this might affect education when people aren't even able to have adequate education in the first place.

Yeah, I mean , I think all those stories about the teachers and and the other battles over money that you're you're talking about, if you put them all together, one of the sort of big things that I point out, is that public education has become politicized and that is an entirely new thing in America.

Public education has always been a bi-partisan agenda that you didn't have - Yeah, there's differences and nuances in terms of how to improve it.

You've never had one side saying do away with it and another side saying keep it.

And that's a very dangerous place that we're in right now, that we are struggling to find bipartisan consensus on the basic foundation of our democracy.

And so as that consensus breaks down we see attacks and the villainization of teachers.

And that's a very different place than we were before and if we can't agree on a commitment to quality teachers that enjoy their job and are respected in their job, we're in a bad place.

If we can't agree that we need to fund education at an adequate level before we start thinking about private school charters or private school vouchers, we're in a really bad place.

And ultimately, that's where we are.

And the trust has broken down on all sides of the equation.

I think that's the real challenge moving forward is to try to rebuild that trust.

Right!

And try to find a common ground and bring public education back to the bipartisan consensus.

Yeah, because I know your book again doesn't just focus on South Carolina, it focuses on the country, our history of education in the country.

But you know, when we look at South Carolina, we're not very unique compared to these other states.

I mean our teachers lag in pay.

Our schools have been up you know consistently under-funded, still are.

You know the corridor of shame still exists in South Carolina and now COVID is challenging all this and in some ways making it worse.

I just want to kind of get your thoughts on how you see South Carolina fitting into this broader picture of where we stand right now as a country going forward in this fight for public education.

Yeah, I mean the first thing I would say, which is sad is there's a really disconnect between what regular everyday folks want and what state legislators are doing and that's true in South Carolina and that's true in other states.

There was a public polling analysis that looked at - that looked at who are the voters and let's have a sample that represents them based on race, party, etcetera.

They did it in all the southern states and South Carolina like everyone else they found that there's overwhelming support for fully funding our schools, reducing inequality and the belief there actually is a problem there right now.

And the key thing is that only two or three percentage points separates Republican voters from Democratic voters.

That's regular folks.

Now, if you go to the State House, it's an entirely different thing, but what we really see is an outpouring of sort of emotion and demands of regular citizens of both parties saying fund our schools, right.

We had the one of the largest demonstrations in the history of South Carolina here on the steps of the state capitol, just a couple years ago, and that wasn't a one party sort of group of folks.

And so, what we really have is people who realize that their schools are struggling, realize that the teachers are short.

I mean, just the other day, I saw that Lexington and some other schools in South Carolina, they're having to close down because they don't have enough teachers.

They don't have enough teachers to open the doors.

We're relying on substitutes and we don't have enough substitutes.

So there's a real crisis at this moment and part of that's COVID, right.

People are afraid or concerned about their health, but at the same time there's a decade and a half of disrespect and mistreatment that led up to this moment and there's there's just not enough good faith and trust for reasonable minds to meet in the middle.

And so we've got to get in South Carolina, rebuild that trust and respect.

Professor, I just want to ask you one more question before we go along these lines.

That's looking at funding, you know, a phrase that stuck out to me in your book, was you say states don't need to experiment.

They need to fund it.

Now, we know that money isn't the entire answer to everything, but it's critical.

And you point out studies continue to show the importance of having adequate funding, especially for low income students to succeed.

Kind of just tell me about you know the funding aspect when we continue to argue back and forth over how we fund public education and how important it is to actually adequately fund it.

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of folks that like to say that money doesn't matter or that money is wasted.

Sure.

Money is wasted, but money certainly matters.

And I'll just tell you, you can't have pre K. without more money and ultimately, you know, uniformly research shows that pre K. is the best thing we can do for low income kids.

The other best thing we can do is have smaller classrooms, right.

Those children from disadvantaged backgrounds need more specialized attention and ultimately smaller class sizes cost more money.

And so you know it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that money will matter if we are moving it towards those two things.

At the same time, there's enormous turnover in the teaching ranks, which is that folks leave after their third or fourth year really because their salary started low and they remain low and they're looking for other ways to raise their family.

You know, we know here in South Carolina that we've got teachers that work on the weekends and nights at second jobs just to make ends meet.

These literally are the people that we are entrusting with the foundation of our democracy.

And they have to work a second job in the evenings and weekends to be able to make the sacrifice for our democracy.

We can't continue this way for an indefinite period of time.

That's a very important book right there too, important all round, especially as we go into legislative session next year and we look at what's going to be the future of South Carolina in our state.

So, Professor Derek Black, the author of Schoolhouse Burning, Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.

He's also a professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Professor, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

To keep you updated throughout the week, check out the South Carolina Lede, it's the podcast I host multiple times a week.

You can find it on South CarolinaPublicradio.org or wherever you find podcasts.

For South Carolina ETV, I'm Gavin Jackson.

Be well, South Carolina