Slashdot Mirror
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.
[...] 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.
They are prisoners. They are not lacking a limb, but something of equal importance for human personality: Their freedom.
It's the opposite of *being alive* (in the metaphorical sense).
Statistically, crime has gone *down*.
Only fear has gone up. On a level that I have to call it a pandemic of mental illness.
We walked to school in the 80s. Or to the bus stop. Everyone. To first class even. (OK, this was central Europe. Don't know about the US.)
So logically, that should still be the case, and parents should be *more* relaxed. They aren't. That is called a delusion. It requires therapy.
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.
Iâ(TM)m a big privacy advocate but even so, I can't really get worked up by this. A teacher should have the ability to manage content and focus in the classroom setting.
As someone who taught CompSci, I agree.
That said, a transparent proxy with a whitelist on it was once more than sufficient (a somewhat modified squid box was pretty much all I needed - if a student wanted access to something outside the whitelist, he/she sent a short internal 'email' with the URL, but that was rarely needed).
Then again, such a solution was sufficient in 1999-2005, even if the student was given unfettered access to the computers within the classroom - after all, desktops were the norm, and nobody took anything home with them. Not really the case today.
I do agree with these further measures above however on two (and only two) conditions:
* That camera/microphone access not be granted under any reason (seriously, kids keep these things in their bedrooms, and there is no valid use case for audio/video access by a competent teacher and/or administrator). A keylogger, screen-share, remote-lock, remote-wipe, app history, and a streaming log of URLs/files accessed (ELK, Splunk, whatever) should be more than plenty, with alerting to any tampering of protected files. (IIRC there was a huge kerfuffle a long while back where some overreaching school district demanded the ability to capture webcam video remotely, even in the students' homes... that died real quick once lawyers got wind of it, and for some massively obvious reasons.)
* No corporate access to any of the data, for any reason. Get your revenue off the licenses, and from nothing else.
Make this known up-front, and require a signed (by the parents) receipt and understanding of a basic EULA stating as much. It is school property, so the legality should be fine in most places (The EU may require a lot of additional precautions, but North America and most of Asia should be no problem.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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)?
I would not have had as much fun or experienced so much as a kid growing up if I"d been surveyed constantly like they are today.
Hell, if I were raised like they are today, I guess I"d have been taken away from my parents by protective services (I did play and run all over neighborhoods un-supervised for most any given day).....and likely my antics would have landed me likely on some terrorist watch list.
That and when I sit around with old friends, we trade stories of mischief we got into....thankfully no photo documentation of it to haunt our adult lives, but we do all remember and laugh about it over drinks from time to time.
I'll definitely trade my independence and ability to run all over the place unsupervised, and to spend genuine time in meatspace with friends I am still close with over these past decades, over the higher tech today....where you see kids on a date out heads bent over phones rather than interacting with each other, getting to know each other, etc.
Sure, growing up as I did...I failed, I fucked up...I got caught occasionally, but I lived and learned through it.
ON the other hand, I did have a film camera back in the day, and when it was out....I did make sure to keep all the negatives, if by chance anyone I grew up with becomes a senator or runs for president...so that I can a good job/compensation for keeping said negatives private.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For fuck's sake if you think kids are abusing their smartphones in class then just take them away or institute a policy whereby they're only allowed to have basic dumbphones with them at school, you don't start treating them like they're convicts in prison. Trust and respect work both ways. If you continually tell a kid he (or she) is bad, eventually they will believe it themselves and act accordingly -- creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Same thing happens by the way with minorities: if you tell a black kid and treat him like he's 'bad' his entire life, eventually he's going to give up and be bad because he'll see he just can't win. Kids of any background will react the same way. If you think you have to resort to the equivalent of putting a GPS ankle monitor on a kid then I say you're the one who screwed up, not the kid.
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 :-( .
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
This is the natural result of a fear driven society. We are so risk adverse that we are steadily introducing and inviting more and more tyranny... and everyone knows that leads to misery, suffering, and conflict.
All, just to keep you safe!
I guess just tracking the ones charged with a crime wasn't enough.
Nope, no sig
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
... not release a bunch of 18 year old naive brats upon universities or the workforce and watch what happens, that's not good parenting either.
Too late. Anybody calling for, say, "save spaces" at a university has no business being there in the first place. An adult is expected to be able to fend for himself/herself to some reasonable degree. Those that cannot or are unwilling to are not adults, but children in adult bodies and a huge problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And thereby anybody at least a bit enterprising and at least a bit capable of thinking independently gets filtered out. Without those people, society dies eventually, because the others cannot hack it on their own.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You have a logical problem there: Being "productive" does not go with "the ability to think critically and independently" in a society that is utterly fucked up and wants nice, little, timid corporate drones as employees.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.