Abstract
Because their populations are inherently vulnerable and unformed, schools cannot help but be test cases for the relation between surveillance and privacy. In this essay, we suggest that many current debates on the topic are ultimately semantic in nature, as vastly different practices—some empathetic, some coercive, some altruistic, some disciplinary—are all lumped together under a single term: surveillance. Our systems of education reflect many often conflicting ambitions (pedagogical, political, medical), each aligned with particular surveillance strategies and mechanisms. We argue that studies of educational surveillance must begin to draw distinctions between diverse surveillance practices and the motives that lie behind them, in order to better understand how students experience and appreciate privacy.
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Notes
- 1.
A US Department of Education position paper from 2012 suggests that “data analytics [might detect] boredom from patterns of [a student’s] key clicks”; if these analytics were applied to work done at home, there would be “a real possibility of continuous improvement via multiple feedback loops that operate at different time scales—immediate to the student, [and] daily to the teacher for the next day’s teaching.” (Bienkowski et al. 2012. Note: although the US Department of Education commissioned this report, it does not necessarily reflect official policy.
- 2.
For more on this topic, see Williamson (2017).
- 3.
Kingery and Coggeshall, in examining “disciplinary surveillance” in the service of “school safety,” warn that inadequate privacy protections are in place, and question the validity of certain forms of school surveillance – but they do not suggest that the surveillance project in question be abandoned or abated, even as they recognize that such monitoring inevitably infringes upon student privacy.
- 4.
Howe and Strauss (2000) are generally credited with coining the term “millennial generation.”
- 5.
The comments of Peter Salovey, the current president of Yale University, may be apropos in this context. When asked about his interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a surveillance-dependent platform increasingly popular in public universities in the USA, he commented:
A quality education represents a process of learning how to think rather than the delivery of packets of information. I’m as excited about online technologies as anyone else, but I want to focus on [engaging] students with faculty in a process of teaching and learning [rather than] simply conveying packets of information and giving people merit badges for having viewed them.
In short: MOOCs are but one of several surveillance-based technologies that won’t be coming to Yale any time soon (Lloyd-Thomas 2013).
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Rosen, D., Santesso, A. (2018). School Surveillance and Privacy. In: Deakin, J., Taylor, E., Kupchik, A. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of School Discipline, Surveillance, and Social Control. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71559-9_25
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