Oct 28 2018
4 Comments
By poolee 322monday20

2020 is the new 1984

In reading “No Dark Corner” by Matthew Carney it is hard to not recall the famous novel by George Orwell.

The article explores the rewards based system that China is planning for 2020. It will score individuals based on prior achievement and future choices. There is a pilot project already in place which uses 200 million CCTV cameras to live update citizen’s scores. High achieving individuals receive VIP status at airports and hotels and no down payments on things like car rentals or homes. It is hard to argue that this doesn’t sound appealing. Who wouldn’t want to be rewarded for good behaviour? If you always pay your bills on time and are a model citizen why shouldn’t you receive some perks here and there? Everyone loves a gold star.

However, there is the other side of the coin. Low performing individuals are penalized to the degree of being cast out of their own society. They become unable to purchase travel tickets, or acquire certain jobs. There is a Chinese journalist who has become housebound and fears for the future security of his family. His freedom of speech has been removed and his social media censored. The thought alone of this is terrifying to me, however it is in fact a dystopian future that many people are living.

The idea of this is so jarring to me because I am fortunate to live in a country where I have freedom of speech and am able to make as many (reasonable) life mistakes as I choose without facing severe repercussions.

When I think of this notion of reward and retract in terms of education, I see some scary parallels. I understand that China’s demerit system is the extreme, but rewards based systems have existed in education for years. When these types of reinforcements are used in the classroom we are telling students that their worth is based off of a quantifiable number. Some of this parallel can be observed in Natasha Singer’s “Privacy Concerns for Class Dojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren”.

In reflecting on both articles, I know that I believe that classroom management and creating rules and consequences for students is imperative. I also firmly believe in teaching them transferrable life skills and that teaching those skills are arguably more important than curriculum. However, I don’t believe in tracking behaviour and rewarding certain students while routinely punishing others. I also firmly disagree with the awful component of publicly tracking them. This method simply tells students that we value them solely off of their behaviour and not based on what they have to contribute to the learning environment.

In my classrooms I have tried to the best of my ability to make it part of my practice to welcome all facets of students, positive and negative. I think when we give ourselves a way to keep tabs on student behaviour it can influence the way we think and feel about them. I aspire to get to the point where I am able to leave most of my preconceived notions and conscious and subconscious biases at the door of my room.

 

For this artifact I chose to complete a Twitter thread because I am more comfortable with writing out my thoughts than representing them visually (although the gif’s do add alot). I tried to post the thread the first time but only the gif’s posted with no written content. PANIC ENSUED. I am not super tech savvy and started to freak. I had lost all of my work with nothing saved. I was restarting at ground zero. I recreated the thread to the best of my memory (the gif’s I had used the first time actually helped me remember my written content – shocking), screen shotted them this time just in case and reposted. Tada, my first successful Twitter thread. I felt complete relief and something akin to pride in my ability to get it to work.

Check out my social media prowess

Still not entirely sure how other people nicely embed photos into their actual posts. I will make that my goal for my next artifact assignment!

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