Surveillance Education

by Nolan Higdon, Allison Butler

182 pages, Paperback

Published August 2, 2024

Reviews

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This year I read "Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, a book that is among the most important books of the last twenty-five years or so about the state of our information age and what price we are paying for convenience and online social interactions. "Surveillance Education" is an essential follow-up, especially for those who work in the field of schooling. This might sound back-handed, I assure it is not, but one of the best compliments I can give is that "Surveillance Education" is a short read. It is well-sourced and so there are many materials one can turn to to get a fuller story, but Butler and Higdon succinctly lay out a solid case for fighting back against some of the systems that are exploiting teachers' labor and mining students' data without proper authorization or safeguards. After reading this, I found myself thinking hard about the subject of "privacy" and why we don't talk about it enough as a virtue worth preserving. We also do not seem to pass this virtue down to young people in schools. Marshall McLuhan's maxim, "The Medium is the Message," is inescapable. In schools, the message seems to be - Accept the technologies that you are told to use (never mind what they take from you), anticipate being assumed a cheater whenever you turn something in, and get used to being watched everywhere you go. I think of schools as sanctuaries of learning. I think that learning has to happen in places where people feel safe and that safety isn't only meant in the physical sense, school is also meant to be a place where it is safe to make mistakes, safe to try on new personas and see what sticks (think middle and high school), safe to push social boundaries and find out where those boundaries indeed lay. I think that some amount of privacy is needed for this to happen. I don't like the idea of young people going to a place of learning where the presupposition is that everything they say and do may be a matter of a permanent record that may, at best, be used to sell them things in the future and at worse may marginalize them and rob them of dignities that we can't yet predict. I'll climb down from my podium and just say, "Tis a good read."