Prof. James F Tracy: The Technocratization of Public Education

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is directing $1.1 million to fit students in seven US public school districts with galvanic skin response bracelets. The devices are designed to measure students' receptivity to teachers lessons through biometric technology that reads and records skin conductance, a form of electro-dermal activity that grows higher during states such as boredom or relaxation. The funding is part of the Gates Foundations $49.5 million Measures of Effective Teachers project that is presently experimenting with teacher evaluation systems. As Melinda Gates put it on the PBS News Hour, 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. The effort of extraordinarily wealthy elites to further subvert educational practices through neuromarketing techniques, is the latest example in a long sequence of educational reforms, dating to the early 1900s. Indeed, the Gates Foundations fixation on stimulus-response measurement and data collection is a fitting chapter of this history. State sanctioned education in the United States has become a type of task-oriented training, quite apart from what education once involved, the cultivation of the human will and intellect. Children in most public schools today receive this type of conditioning, while the more affluent often send their offspring to private institutions or home school. What passes for education today, is to a significant degree the legacy of late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth century German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and the Rockefeller family's philanthropic project. A professor at University of Leipzig, Wundt was the originator of what he termed a new or experimental psychology of any of its potential philosophical concerns with the soul, will, or self-determination of the individual.