The classroom as panopticon; protecting your rights in the technology-enhanced workplace

The history of the Industrial Revolution is the history of increasing product and profit through the efficiencies afforded by increasing control over the process. As industrialization progressed through its various phases, one outcome was always predictable. The movement of workers would be more carefully choreographed, production would be more closely planned and monitored, and the gathering and distribution of information would be in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Despite the rhetoric of the information age and the knowledge revolution, the future is beginning to look a great deal like the past on steroids. Efficiency-mania has tightened its grip on the workplace and threatens to leave no sector untouched – not even education. Recent reforms, especially the demands of accountability through intensive measurement, are designed to make education increasingly “outcomes-based.” It is getting harder to tell that education is, as Neil Postman so eloquently puts it, about “creating a public” not about creating a product.