Volume 2 issue 2 December 2014
Surveillance and EducationDavid Rosen and Aaron Santesso
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Few contemporary spaces are as thoroughly surveilled as the classroom. And yet, because educational surveillance consists not of one dominant activity, but of several semi-autonomous practices, which are not often thought of as related, it has attracted far less attention than, say, the bulk gathering of metadata by government security agencies. This paper undertakes to begin tracing the connections between, among other things, the in-classroom use of CCTV cameras; the spread of assessment and testing-regimes; dataveillance by providers of educational products; and the replacement of face-to-face learning by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). To date, legal recourse against these initiatives has been a piecemeal affair, centreing around issues like the parental control of information about children, or job security for teachers.
This paper argues that the various and scattered modes of educational surveillance can be understood as connected through one issue: privacy rights. In the American tradition (going back to Warren and Brandeis, 1890), privacy is understood as a necessary precondition for the formation of an autonomous person. This paper argues that, in its various forms, educational surveillance has the effect of interrupting or manipulating this maturation process. Although the motives for this manipulation (by governments or businesses) differ, its effects can be explored in the traits ascribed to the so-called millennial generation (those born between 1982 and 2004). The paper concludes by relating the effects of educational surveillance to the larger separation of the very rich from everyone else, a process occurring on multiple vectors in society today. |