The Independent reports that almost six million children at 17,000 schools could have their fingerprints taken, intensifying fears of the growth of a “surveillance society” where personal information is gathered from cradle to grave. This continuous and almost always unverifiable surveillance turns everyone into suspects and, as Michel Foucault noted in Discipline and Punish, has implications for the establishment of normalization practices.
Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland told the House of Commons on 23 July 2007 that the guidance from British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) failed to establish a legal requirement for schools to acquire parental consent before collecting their child’s biometric data. He cited an online poll of 1,400 parents conducted last summer by civil liberties group, Leave them kids alone, which found that 94% were against schools taking biometric data without parental consent.
Many people are uncomfortable about to the willingness of various public and private agencies to turn ordinary management and administrative tasks into surveillance activities, and usually support their case with civil liberties arguments. The threat to privacy is compelling, but for schools the issue goes much further, because such systems ultimately compromise the learning environment schools should foster. In his book The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett argues that an excessively ordered community freezes people into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He observes that the accepted ideal of imposed order means people never learn to develop inter-personal skills for themselves, and their behaviour tends to become authoritarian, narrow and sometimes violent.
The long-term social costs will be profound. As Oscar Wilde said in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.“
