Yesterday I posted a blog about the Gates Foundation funding research at Clemson University for something called Galvanic Response Skin bracelets. The project will enable researchers at Clemson to work with researchers in the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to measure student engagement physiologically. MET is the Gates program to identify the most effective (and ineffective) teachers. It is the heart of the Gates’ teacher evaluation program, into which the Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars. It is the program that will one day make possible what Melinda Gates recently predicted: And so what the foundation feels our job is to do is to make sure we create a system where we can have an effective teacher in every single classroom across the United States.
These bracelets, as I understand it, would be worn by students to measure how engaged they are, how bored they are, how they respond to their teachers. If they are bored, it won’t look good for the teacher. If students who show a high level of engagement, the teacher will get credit. The teachers too will wear the bracelet, to find out how engaged or bored they are. If this technology works, it will provide a foolproof tool for teacher evaluation. Or that’s the idea behind it.
On Twitter, one of the readers of this blog told me about yet another Gates grant, this one to the National Center on Time and Learning, Inc., last November. This grant, for $621,265, has the following purpose: “to measure engagement physiologically with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Galvanic Skin Response to determine correlations between each measure and develop a scale that differentiates different degrees or levels of engagement.”
I’m sorry. I think this is madness. Is there a mad scientist or psychologist advising the Gates Foundation? Does Dr. Moreau work in a Gates laboratory in Seattle?
This stuff crosses the line from legitimate research to investing in technologies to control and manipulate people by monitoring their emotions.
Have these people ever heard of rights to privacy? Does this GSR bracelet and MRI constitute some sort of emotional hacking?
I am hoping to get an outraged email from the Gates Foundation tomorrow informing me that someone hacked into their website and that none of this is true.
I hope.
Stay tuned.
Diane
I feel like I am reading a dystopian novel. I hope I am. The reality is too painful.
That is the problem. People cannot stand to accept things that are scary or painful, so they remain willfully blind to it all. This interview explains a lot about the global elite and how they really do control and rule the world in the first 10 minutes. Watch it and share it. Estulin also touches on education toward the end.
And here some eye-opening additional information about the recent meeting! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/jun/05/bilderberg-2012-chantilly-occupy?newsfeed=true
And once upon a time CT scans we’re safe for kids and now studies link them to brain cancer…I doubt this will ever happen…parents have to wake up some time…if we educate school boards to hire effective principals that come from classrooms and not principal mills, principals who know effective teaching when they see it, we wouldn’t need engagement monitoring bracelets….Mamabooch
Gates is actually having a seriously bad influence on the scientific community. He has used his bully pulpit to sway some but not all of scientific critics. The only way this research would get published would be if he controls the editorial board which he is showing he already can do with scientific funding into malaria and GMO versus natural breeding studies in Africa. I have no dog in the fight for either but the way his money and foundation bastardizes science for their vision of what is right is chilling and not just in the realm of education.
I think this is just a boondoggle actually about galvanic testing= nutritional status, sleep monitoring and drug intake would all have to be controlled for this to even have any degree of relevance. Hmmmm, trade off societal poverty influence of poor nutrition and inadequate health care. anxiety around family troubles due to ill health or incarceration and sleep for a bracelet. This might actually help education but not anything in the way that would really help expose the real problems of a great many young lives.
This sounds like the educational grant equivalent of mood rings.
What parent would ever allow their child to be subjected to such nonsense?
I wonder if he isn’t going to hook his factory workers up to these galvanic bracelets to look their productivity? Cynical but Gates altruistic streak seems so much tied to his self interest.
Or even more cynically. parents will be able to log in through out the day to monitor their child and then have those results indicating low level responses be part of a teacher conference. The infamous Mrs. Trunchbull from Matilda would have flying colors with this scheme.
I think they should just use mood rings.
It is a similar step to equipping the entire population with microchips. Scary nano technology is already here and can be used for nefarious purposes. I guess Homeland Security and the TSA would love to have people fitted (or better, implanted) with such devices too.
And nobody thinks this is contrary to our privacy rights under the Constitution. We all better think hard if we are willing to fight this when it will be forced upon us someday!
Of course, Bill Gates is a big player among the global elite. He’s been known to attend Bilderberg meetings which many people still do not know of, or do not think it’s a problem that those people meet in secret!
This is brilliant, when you think about it. First outfit kids and students with such devices and the masses will think…how handy and may follow suit without needing to be forcefully “shackled”.
Look how we have all been conditioned to accept the idea that schools with low-scoring students should be closed. That never happened before in U.S. history. Start one at a time, then accelerate. In the same way, begin with bracelets to measure skin response, then implant a chip to save money. As the population gets older, they won’t object because it started long ago, so long ago that no one remembers when. And then…who will be left to say no?
Yes Diane, start slowly and then accelerate. It’s the “put the frog in cold water and slowly warm it up, instead of throwing it in scalding water (which makes him try to jump out immediately)” principle! Worrisome indeed!
I used to think that Bill Gates was obsessed with teachers, but I realize he’s actually obsessed with children. The man is a soul-less lunatic. This is what happens when a culture believes that those who achieve riches are somehow all-knowing.
It is time for us to begin visual protests. If we wait much longer, we are doomed. Inform 10 parents about this and get them to protest with you! Australia and Canada have had enough from their governments and are letting them know it. What is wrong with us? I will not monitor my “tone” and I will not teach a child with a tracking tag or a mood monitoring bracelet on their person. It was bad enough when they were attacking me. Now I am abusing children by having to provide an inferior education so they will be “test ready”. It is time to draw the line in the sand, while we are still able to see the sand!
We must begin to protest very loudly! As teachers we have been very complacent and taken the abuse dealt us. As parents and grandparents, we have quietly allowed this nonsense to enter our public schools without making a sound. Students are receiving an inferior education so they can be “test ready”. Now we are going to allow them to wear tracking tags and mood monitoring bracelets? Not on my watch. It is time to draw the line in the sand and begin to protest loudly! And I will not worry about my “tone”. We are past “Save Our Schools”, it is time to “Save Our Children”!
So true Amy. When I posted a comment to Diane’s entry on someone’s FB page, my husband said “Are you not afraid they’ll come and get you and make you disappear (which is now possible under the NDAA!)” and I told him…we should not be afraid of such things, YET. Now is the time to speak out…if we wait, it will be too late.
You may want to follow Naomi Wolf who’s rather perceptive on all these signs of a closing society. She also welcomes people’s opinions on anything so perhaps Diane can find a venue through her site too. Check it out; http://dailycloudt.com/
And here an interesting interview she did with RT:
”..If you lock up a handful of highly visible people indefinitely, everyone goes quiet. You don’t need a giant massacre, you don’t even need giant prison camps. You just need that one power”
Yes, let’s hope this is just a silly joke. I mean–I can engage a student in all-out quackery. That doesn’t guarantee s/he is learning anything worthwhile. Engagement certainly isn’t a bad thing but only when paired with meaningful learning (in a school setting, that is) And how spooky big brother-style is this? Yikes.
“I can engage a student in all-out quackery.” Exactly!
I’ve taught Middle and High School English for 37 years. I know that my students are sometimes most engaged when I abandon my lesson (for better or worse), when I tell a personal tall tale, when I engage in banter with individual kids — and all of this is fine if kept in balance, because it builds the relationships and shapes the community. But it is not directly a part of delivering the curriculum, and, despite my happy efforts to build the community and enthusiasm, I’m sure to lose some when the curriculum takes center stage, as it usually does.
That was my first thought when I read about the absurd Gates/Clemson research plan. Equally important in my reaction now is that “spooky big brother” — not a minor point.
Will he be willing to put them on his own children and their teachers? It is hard for me to believe that his children are always focused, always intrigued, and always engaged. It is hard for me to believe that his children’s teachers always have lessons that are the most interesting to all students, are always seeing every student engaged. Both student and teacher have bad days when nothing goes right, nothing sinks in and no light bulbs go on.
[…] More about Our Brave New World is by Diane Ravitch. […]
Clearly we live in an age of madness… when folks can think employees of any profession would put up with this is astounding, add to this our willingness to embrace anything claiming to e research and we are indeed headed for a brave new world… and not one that appears to be of benefit to humanity.
and of course this system can still be gamed, we won’t have to medicate the hyperactive kids because they’ll be excited all the time…. and we can help the rest by educating them on a diet of candy, sugary soft drinks, and flashing lights to get the energy up.
Add video game technology and we’ll all be excited all the time.
When I read this I started to recall something from my very early childhood (mid 1950’s). In a shoe store one could have an xray taken to see if the shoes you were considering allowed proper fit of the shoe. BUt it just revealed the bones…so a chubbier kid could end up with shoes too tight as soft tissue wasn’t visible. And the xray could have serious repercussions. So a child was subjected to something potentially harmful to perform a function that didn’t really occur. The technology was not appropriate for the situation and if this is an accurate report it is again a mismatch of tool for the job.
“Our business is to first of all to be aware of what is happening, then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances shall be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their ultimate degradation.” ~ Aldous Huxley, U.C. Berkely, 1962