Spyware turned a Kansas high school into a 'red zone' of dystopian surveillance

> So I ditched as much class as I could and spent my time racing muscle cars on Route 66 outside of my hometown of Baxter Springs and pursuing other misadventures. I was always reading, though, and in between repairing blown head gaskets and thrown timing chains I had my nose in books, trash and treasure alike, from “The Monkey Wrench Gang” to Hemingway and Harper Lee. My high school guidance counselor told me I should give up my dreams of being a writer and join the Navy instead. I managed to graduate from high school by the intervention of a school superintendent who reckoned I was smarter than I looked and allowed me to test out of some required classes. I still have my graduation photo around someplace, me at 17 in a cap and gown and leaning against the hood of an old GTO.

> Later I went to college and washed out after a semester or two and then gave it another try after a couple of years and did better. I eventually graduated from a four-year public university in Kansas and then got an advanced degree and spent some years as an investigative reporter at daily newspapers and published a couple of dozen books with New York houses.

I know this isn’t the point of the article but I find this kind of opening to be kind of grating. It sets up the subtext that the difference between the author’s experience and the current experience is that the schools have changed; and they have, but also the broader economic context is just wildly different. The author’s path is not likely to pan out in the current environment and identifying the change on pressure and outlook for the kids is a big part of the problem.

I used to be a physics teacher; I taught in schools in Australia and the United Kingdom. One of the things that still horrifies me is that many of my colleagues - in Australia in particular - were not terribly clever.

In job interviews, there were questions that only make sense to me now in hindsight. One of those questions was about how the teachers that I had had at school influenced my teaching. My answer - which was not well received - was that I didn't remember much of my teachers. I taught physics because I liked physics, and I liked the way of understanding the world it imparted, and I wanted to share that.

The final straw that made me leave teaching was a Head of Languages telling me that a good teacher could teach any subject. This is not a good thing to say to someone who has been recruited from the other side of the world because there aren't enough qualified candidates in your own country. But for most of my colleagues, it was considered true: walk away from a five-minute conversation with them, and you'd have had a hard time guessing what subject they taught.

When I started at a new school, there'd usually be a friendly old hand who would offer to look over my class lists and tell me which students were 'good' and which... weren't. That assessment was always to do with behaviour (read: docility); it was never about aptitude or enthusiasm for science.

Everything in education is about effort: report comments are about effort; exam success is attributed to effort; the discourse surrounding teachers is always about effort. Cleverness is a non-concept in education.

Relationships are important in education, but we've somehow ended up in a situation where teachers are unable to see little else. (I personally blame low pay and poor working conditions.) People who see everything in terms of personal relationships struggle with abstract concepts and systems.

There is always dissent amongst school teachers. Every new idea, every new pedagogical initiative is a new battlefield on which moral superiority can be contested. (I played this game badly then, and I suspect I might be playing it badly now.) There will be teachers who support this AI monitoring; there will be teachers who are vehemently opposed.

I'm sure that even those of us here on HN who have wholeheartedly bought into AI will have some doubts about this product's ability to meet the claims in its advertising copy, but the teachers who support this product won't be able to understand these arguments. These are people who can't imagine a totalitarian dystopia as a system of rules and regulations; they need a novel like 1984 so they can see how a person suffers under such a system.

Those teachers are going to have to see a grave miscarriage of justice before they understand that the AI can't be trusted as a fellow teacher can; that the AI is going to make mistakes; that adolescents' emotional instability and poor emotional communication will generate numerous false positives; and that you can't take pedagogical advice from salespeople.