Are the Kids All Right? These School Surveillance Apps Sure Want To Tell You (theoutline.com)

A number of businesses are rushing in to watch everything kids do on their school-issued tech, reports the Outline. From the story: As schools struggle to catch up with the fast-moving online environment, technology can seem like both the cause of and solution to life's problems. Increasingly, schools are turning to high-tech surveillance tools to supervise students online. As Nelson, who has worked in education for 20 years, told The Outline: "There has always been a small proportion of the student body that are going to be jerks or are struggling. With technology, they're able to [do harm] much more quickly and intensely."

[...] Apps like Apple Classroom, DyKnow, and ClassDojo extend these common disciplinary practices into online spaces. Apple Classroom and DyKnow, which bills itself as "classroom-management software for teachers," allow teachers to remotely lock students' computers or tablets into particular apps in order to cut off distractions and the temptation to cheat. These apps also let teachers call up real-time images of students' screens and histories of apps each student has used during class to check who has been following instructions and who was off-task.

Comments

Re: So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Locking the devices to use a specific app or set of apps is totally fine. If they do that, they don't need to monitor what the kids are doing. And checking if the kids are on task?? That's dumb - either they complete the work and turn it in or they don't. This micromanagement is actually bad for kids. They need to learn values and consequences, not to be bodies in a police state.

Depends what you do about it

[Solandri]

So if your surveillance detects that some kid has managed to hack their device so they can use it to watch movies in class without it triggering any alarms, but oddly their grades have not fallen, do you:

• A. Suspend the kid and call in the cops because you suspect he hacked his grades.
• or B. Send him to a different class teaching advanced computer science since he's clearly got talent for something outside the regular school curriculum.

That is, are you trying to create an educational program which generates cookie-cutter kids, even if it means pounding square kids into round holes to force them to become round? Or is your educational program designed to allow each kid to explore, discover, and improve their unique talents and abilities? Is the surveillance for the benefit of the state (making life easier for teachers and administrators), or for the benefit of the students (expanding their future job opportunities)?

As an old fart ...

[Big Bipper]

who was schooled in the 60s, and who doesn't have children of his own, I have to say that that I thank God that I'm not growing up or have kids today. My neighbours had their young grand kids ( 5 and 7 ) to stay for a month on their farm last summer and I was appalled by the stories they told of how parents are forced to raise their children now. They had to teach their grand kids that it was OK ( at the farm ) to just go outside and play in the yard or field whenever they wanted to, without having to ask for permission first. At home, if they were found alone in the park across the street from their home ( even though their mother could see them from her kitchen window ), the police would be called. Kids today are not being taught how to live in a real world, instead they are just being conditioned to live as obedient serfs and not think for themselves. If TPTB ( banksters, elites, globalists, whatever you call them ) haven't bought-stolen everything by the time today's kids reach adulthood, they can just sit back and tell their serfs to give the rest to them :-( .

Giving them more of what made them sick

[jenningsthecat]

Forced from an early age to follow somebody else's idea of a schedule. Taken away from their families for many hours a day. Not allowed to pursue the things that truly interest and excite them. Forced to learn things which they're not interested in. Taught that knowledge is acquired by being stuffed full of it and then regurgitating it, as opposed to living and learning organically in the real world in real situations. Encouraged to believe that learning is hard, and that there is only one right way and only one approved opportunity to study any given subject or discipline. Actively prevented from learning what they might learn easily and enthusiastically, because 'that's not what we're studying right now'. Discouraged from being individuals, from being 'different'. In some cases, all of this pounding of square pegs into the approved round holes results in "jerks or (those who) are struggling". In other cases it results 'merely' in people who fall far short of the potential they were born with. So what's the proposal for 'fixing' these students? Why, of course, the answer must be more monitoring, more hand-holding, more theft of their autonomy, more invasion in their lives - still more prescription, and still more proscription. Do educators and authorities really not get that doing the same shit over and over again and expecting a different result is a symptom of insanity?

I suspect public schooling damages children neurologically. There's a lot of talk about how people's brains don't really mature until they're in their twenties, yet there have been more than a few examples throughout history of people in their early teens starting successful companies, commanding troops in battle and winning, and so forth. What if the public schools' lack of real-world engagement and experience and autonomy starves young brains of the stimulation that would, via neuro-plasticity, mature those brains much sooner? What if the constant thwarting of their every impulse and inclination dulls children and pre-disposes them to apathy and/or anger and/or despair? Just to be clear - yes, I AM theorizing that school might cause brain damage. I'm fairly certain that in many people it causes soul damage. It did in my case.

Anybody who is disgusted and saddened by the Orwellian interventions described in TFA really should read John Taylor Gatto's 'Underground History of American Education'. It totally changed my view of both the efficacy and the purpose of public education as it has been practised during the last century. The book is out of print, but is available in PDF as a free download - check it out via your favourite search engine.