Surveillance Education Tracks the Rise of Spying Technology in Schools

When students are afraid of making mistakes, they may participate less, which undermines the learning process. A 2021 survey revealed that almost 60% of students reported censoring things they were writing, and 80% censored their web searches due to an awareness of monitoring. This puts educators in quite the conundrum as they need to procure student participation, but must be cognizant of the fact that by centering student participation, they simultaneously encourage students to compromise their privacy. Research reveals that students react to surveillance by behaving in an inauthentic and docile way to appease their instructor. Educators know that trust is essential for fostering a successful learning environment. However, studies show that rather than develop an inclusive environment, when schools surveil students, students feel as though they are not trusted and reciprocate with waning trust toward the school. Indeed, rather than feel safe when surveilled, students may feel villainized by the school and their teachers, leading to a breakdown in trust.

Surveillance tools that purport to enhance education are actually replacing learning with vapid forms of engagement, and in the process normalizing ignorance. The widespread use of digital tools has come at a cost: They change the ways young people’s brains develop, and as a result, students increasingly have a shorter attention span, weaker memory, and underdeveloped critical thinking skills. Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell argue that the utilization of these tools contributes to a narcissism epidemic, where students feel that they are smarter than they actually are, and are unable to accept feedback that could improve their skills. Many families and teachers make the mistake of thinking that technology use is, in and of itself, a learning process that is good for the student, when in fact not all technology use is the same. Studies show social media can be good for promoting a school’s image, professional development for educators, but beyond engaging students it is not clear how it is improving learning. Media literacy education scholar David Buckingham notes that too much attention to technology as technology obfuscates how technology manipulates – and is manipulated by – users. What we do with technology influences technology as much as technology influences humans and yet, for the most part, technology is bestowed with a fascination and power that, on its own, cannot be upheld. The technology itself is not the problem, it is the way it is utilized to undermine human autonomy in the classroom.

Surveillance at the Expense of Student Autonomy

This loss of human autonomy is a feature, not a bug, of surveillance capitalism. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which communicated the philosophy of early Silicon Valley, argued that the goal of tech was to change civilization. Companies such as Google interpreted this to mean that the human brain would be made irrelevant as technology grew more efficient. This line of thinking is repeated in industry rhetoric that falsely claims that technology is “smart” and humans are not, and inventions such as driverless cars which claim that the human driver needs to be replaced for the objective machine. However, lost in this line of thinking is that humans will have less autonomy as technology makes more determinations about human behaviors and actions. Maria, the middle-school science teacher in New York City, feels a degree of discomfort in monitoring her students, even though, as shown in Chapter 1, she also knows it is an effective tool for classroom management