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Except for the parents, it's nobody's business what the children do after school. How can children learn about freedom when all their movements are scrutinized and analyzed all the time.

Plus it's really not a good metric. There are many ways to learn a topic. There's fast learners, those who gather information trough other sources, those who like to work in groups. Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric.

"How can children learn about freedom when all their movements are scrutinized and analyzed all the time."

There's an implicit assumption there--consider that there is decent evidence that modern schooling (periods, bells, etc.) is a direct product of the need for factory shift workers.

There is no inherent good (from the government point of view--local, state, or federal) in teaching about freedom.

> Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric

I really don't understand this attitude. Of course this will not work if it is used incorrectly. Why would you expect any different? However, the same can be said for normal course work. What if the teacher gets the students to read only the first word of each sentence? This shows books will never work, and lecturing is the only way to teach.

Putting that aside, the point is that as you say, there are many ways to learn a topic. Asking children how they best learn things is not going to get useful answers most of the time, but analysis of reading and research patterns using sophisticated data mining or ML software will allow teachers to segment their students into groups that all learn in a similar way. So everyone benefits.

As I suggest above, I'd go further than instrumenting the ebooks. If they are on a tablet device using the Internet, then instrument the browser too, and you can correlate Wikipedia and Google searches with whatever page of the textbook they were on, and see what topics are unclear and always need additional research. You would also find out which students are deeply interested in the topic, as they read on past the end of the assignment, and download extra information or search for related topics. And you can discipline those who never open the book a all, and spend all their time looking at amusing cat pictures.

With such power there is also a responsibility to manage the student's privacy appropriately, bout with a school-provided device, similar to a work laptop, they should have no expectation of absolute privacy anyway. I think any worries about monitoring pale into insignificance against the powerful augmented learning regimes that can be created, and a suitable auditing and management routine will prevent any abuse.

I think because we're addressing a different point. Of course it's good to learn more about how humans work and help students to learn but there has to be a scope in it. Hopefully learning is about being curious, discovering new things, playing with the mind. Metrics won't help bored students, they'll just learn to flip the pages at the right time while watching TV. And now interested students get distracted by the same concerns of being over-watched and not doing the same thing. It's really a terrible solution.

If you want to collect metrics then make them as a personal tool. Make a utility for the student, that only him can access, that helps him learn about his studying patterns, give him hints, ... If they want to share them it's on their own term.

> Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

True for the student, but true for the professor too... Why produce a bogus metric such as reading assiduity ?

Applied correctly, I can see it being useful in modeling machine learning algorithms. More data points are almost always a good thing there.

If simply dumped in front of school teachers and administrators, I suspect it would be harmful. The data will simply reinforce biases those people already have about certain students.

Interestingly, the data could be turned around on the teachers as well. A teacher may be so effective that students can pass courses without reading the material. Administrators might not recognize the astounding ability of the teacher and instead interpret it as a teacher handing out easy As.

I've always liked to imagine that if influential educators were genuinely interested in learning, they would make a better effort to account for Campbell's Law.

Perhaps there is an alternative explanation for the rampant misuse of metrics observed in most modern education systems? One that doesn't involve gross incompetence, I hope.

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education.

Well, looks like the US education system has already failed on your second sentence.