Giving Compass' Take:

• Cory Doctorow explains why schools need to step away from surveillance and censorship in order to accomplish their goals of producing well-rounded citizens. 

• How can funders help schools strike the appropriate balance? To what extent is this a policy conversation to be had at the state level? 

• Learn about the availability of student data for sale. 

It’s not unheard of for an instructor to tee up a YouTube video for a lesson, only to have the content blocked by the school or district’s censorware. And while administrators might have good intentions when they decide to use censorware, censorship is often only effective for those who play by the rules.

It’s one reason why writer and activist Cory Doctorow thinks schools and educators should rethink their approach to surveillance and censorship.

There’s an argument being made these days that there’s a need for more surveillance in schools. Where do you stand on that issue? 

The reason the debate is hard is because we are talking about short-term instrumental goals and long-term strategic goals. So, obviously, a school’s purpose is to produce well-rounded, self-actualizing, self-starting, full-fledged citizens who are capable of participating in a democracy, and being in the workplace, and having good interpersonal relations.

If you took another domain like interpersonal relations, you could say, “Well, bullying is a problem.” The problem of bullying could be prevented by just not letting kids talk to each other. That would be a short-term instrumental goal that would absolutely take a real bite out of bullying, but we can understand immediately why it’s not a good one.

And so, normalizing surveillance for kids, on the one hand, ill-equips them to be literate about surveillance in the world. But on the other hand, it means that a lot of the things that we hope that they’ll learn to moderate on their own instead gets moderated by extrinsic motivations. Instead of having good interrelations with other people because good interrelations are fulfilling and produce good outcomes, your good interrelations exist as a formal exercise that you engage in for fear of reprisals.

Read the full interview with Cory Doctorow about education surveillance and censorship by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge.