In an effort to prevent the sexual abuse of children, my daughter’s elementary school now requires parents to wear little white nametags when we visit classrooms. I’m pleased to report that Operation Nametag has been a success: No charges of child abuse have been filed since it went into effect.

Well, no new charges. The school is still reeling from the arrest in February of a paraprofessional who has been charged with attempting to molest an 8-year-old boy. As the criminal case creeps through the legal system, parents at my daughter’s school are sad, fearful, confused and, above all, angry that the school can’t guarantee their children’s safety.

I personally don’t expect such a guarantee. I agree with Helen Keller, who wrote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.” But Helen and I hold the minority view. Other parents are proposing a number of reforms that they insist will make my daughter’s school a safer place.

Sadly, many of the ideas are terrible.

One proposal is to install video cameras throughout the elementary school. The vast amount of money and manpower required to build and operate such a system would normally make this idea absurd, but these are not normal times.

So let me cite non-financial facts: Spy cameras in schools rarely if ever prevent adults from doing bad things. Instead, these cameras invariably spy on kids, monitor their movements and punish behavior that would otherwise go unnoticed. In one egregious example, a high school girl in Gig Harbor, Wash., was caught on tape kissing (a quick “peck,” she said) another girl. The tape was shown to the girl’s parents, who quickly transferred their 17-year-old daughter to another school district. (The principal later admitted, “It was not a good use of surveillance.”)

Organizations ranging from the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative National Center for Missing and Exploited Children agree video monitors in schools invade and erode children’s privacy. Yet parents who openly express their distrust of New York's school system seem willing to install spy cameras and trust school officials to use them responsibly.

Another idea is to require all school employees to wear ID badges. While this proposal is more innocuous, it merely serves to make strangers more obvious — and strangers are not the most pressing problem. A far more insidious threat comes from school employees whom the children know and trust.

A sexual predator who wears an official ID badge — the same badge worn by every teacher and principal — merely confuses an already confusing situation. To stop those extremely rare cases in which school employees attempt evil deeds, potential victims must learn to heed a gut feeling that something wrong is taking place. That’s a tough task, and it happens only after parents have undertaken the difficult job of talking to their young children about sexual abuse. Having that talk with your child is the best protection a parent can provide.

My 1st-grader already stands to inherit a world in which privacy and personal freedom will be sacrificed in the name of security. The fact that Big Brother might already be watching her in elementary school is not a comfort to me but rather a source of great sadness, particularly if it occurs because fearful parents insist something, anything, must be done to assure children's safety.

There's an old saying, "A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for." A school that puts security before education — where video cameras watch students' every move, where parents without ID badges are met at the door with a "Do not enter" attitude, where nervous teachers think twice before hugging a crying kindergartner — is a school that has lost sight of its mission.