Big Brother Seeking to Get in Your Child's Head — Literally

With help and funding from the federal government, Big Brother is about to get inside your child's mind — literally. Emerging technologies backed by the U.S. Department of Education are already being deployed in “education,” with federal education bureaucrats hoping to eventually use those tools to monitor and track everything from children's “mindsets” and “attitudes” to their “emotions” and “cognitive processes.” Much of it is being pursued under the guise of improving and individualizing schooling. But the reality is probably not that simple. Experts have been warning about the trends for decades. Even a layman, though, can see the dire potential abuses of such technology.

Aside from official documents, the latest reports to document the troubling trend — albeit while trying to put a smiley face on the developments — come from Education Week. According to an article by Benjamin Herold published last month, under the guise of providing “personalized learning experiences,” new technology is targeting students' “individual emotions, cognitive processes, 'mindsets,' and character and personality traits.” Apparently almost oblivious to the implications of entering into students' minds under the pretext of “educating” them, the multiple Education Week articles and other reports on the issue come across almost as advertisements for Big Brother and his growing capabilities.

On January 6, for example, the education-focused media outlet touted “new efforts to dramatically expand the types of data collected in the classroom and to focus more attention on responding to individual students' 'mindsets,' non-cognitive skills, and emotional states.” Aside from one brief mention of privacy being a major concern, the report does not even consider that parents may not want their children's mindsets and emotional states to be tracked, probed, analyzed, and manipulated by Big Brother. The terrifying potential of such mind-breaking technology in the wrong hands is another subject that is never touched upon in the glowing reports, despite warnings about it from within the federal government stretching back to at least the 1970s.

Among the many tools being pursued are so-called “Intelligent Tutoring Systems,” which monitor, track, and exploit students' emotional and physiological reactions. “The idea is that emotions have a powerful influence on cognition,” computer science and psychology Professor Sidney D'Mello at the University of Notre Dame, who has done a great deal of research in the field, is quoted as saying by Education Week. “Ten years ago, there were things you could do in a lab that you couldn't do in the messiness of the real world,” he said, adding that better and more affordable technology have provided a major boost for researchers. “Now, you can get a reasonable proxy of a student's heart rate from a webcam.”

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