Robotic children

Nick Kettles

2nd February, 2009

Production line education is creating clones and stifling the imagination of our children. Is it any wonder they are stressed and unhappy?

Try not to gulp when you read the next sentence.

According to lobby group Leave Them Kids Alone, upwards of 3,500 UK schools are fingerprinting their students, with biometric equipment bought from two Department for Children, Schools and Families-approved suppliers.

Could there be a more frightening motif for our brave new world of order and control?

It’s true that this equipment is, ostensibly, being used for computerised class registers and libraries, in order to ease the bureaucratic headache of many schools. True, too, that the Information Commissioner has issued guidelines that parental consent should be obtained, and records removed by a data-cleansing service when a child leaves the school. But that really is not the point.

The trend speaks volumes about our mechanised approach to our children in an education system created in the image of the Industrial Revolution and still maintained today, in service of keeping the cogs in the global economy turning. Perhaps it is time to update the old adage that a child is not a vessel waiting to be filled, but a lamp to be lit. In today’s educational climate, perhaps we need to see children not simply as units to be processed and counted,...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login