American Universities Are Creating Social Credit Systems To Track Students, Monitor Their Behavior
A handful of U.S. colleges are employing a type of social credit system through various technologies that are designed to track students as they attend courses and walk across campus.
Universities across the country are using the so-called SpotterEDU app to connect with apps on students’ smartphones for the purpose of boosting their “attendance points.” The app also sees their absences and logs that information into a campus database that tracks them.
“They want those points,” Syracuse University Professor Jeff Rubin, who teaches Introduction to Information Technologies, told The Washington Post. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.” He was referring to the app’s ability to socially engineer his students.
WaPo published a Dec. 24 report discussing the SpotterEDU app.
Not every student is on board with the app and its implications.
“We’re adults. Do we really need to be tracked?” Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, told WaPo. “Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? … And is it just going to keep progressing until we’re micromanaged every second of the day?”
Pfeifer’s campus recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus’s WiFi network, which empower colleges to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than at any other time in American history.
SpotterEDU works with nearly 40 schools, including Central Florida, Missouri and Indiana, among others, according to company chief, Rick Carter, a former college basketball coach. He developed the app in 2015 to watch over his athletes as they navigated their respective campuses.
The app uses Bluetooth beacons, which installers stick on walls and ceilings, to ping a student’s smartphone, WaPo reported. The app then records a students’ presence so advisers know when they are not in attendance or have temporarily stepped out of the room for a break.
“Students today have so many distractions,” Tami Chievous, an associate athletic director at the University of Missouri, told WaPo, adding that tracking students is a tough assignment. “We have to make sure they’re doing the right thing.”
Carter created a euphemism to explain what his app does. He told WaPo he prefers the term “monitored” instead of “tracked,” because the former supposedly carries a negative connotation. “It’s about building that relationship,” so students “know you care about them,” he said.
Schools also can turn to a start-up called Degree Analytics, which uses WiFi check-ins to track roughly 200,000 students across 19 state universities, WaPo reported. Over 98% of a college’s students can be measured and analyzed through Degree Analytics, according to data scientist Aaron Benz, who developed the app in 2017.
Benz’s team designed a set of high-tech algorithms to look for patterns in a student’s behavior and automatically flag when their habits change, a strategy he euphemistically calls scaffolding. Students who deviate from their everyday rhythms are flagged for anomalies.
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No, they’re not adults. Adults don’t need safe spaces. Adults don’t need comfort animals to soothe their tender sensibilities when their feelings get hurt. Adults know socialism is a failed economic model that leads inexorably to Venezuela, Cuba, Angola… Adults listen to opposing points of view. Adults don’t wear face masks and riot. Adults know the difference between men and women. These are spoiled children, not adults.
Our Educational System was modeled on the one in Prussia at the time of our founding, so it is not unexpected that what happened in Germany 100 years ago is repeating itself in the United States. The Prussian model was designed to create a basic level of literacy (reading, writing, basic arithmetic) and train children to conform to a basic code of obedience (today, we would call that “indoctrination”) . That wasn’t the result in America initially because parents in America were NOT of a mind to accept indoctrination and spoke with and taught their children to question what they learned and insisted that school teachers teach what the parents wanted taught: solve problems, think and behave morally, understand the reasons behind what was taught, QUESTION EVERYTHING. But in the 60’s the desire to “keep up with the Joneses” and womens’ rights pulled many women out of the home into the work force and a majority parents no longer questioned what their children were being taught, or challenged with opposite reasoning. They gave their children’s future into the hands of the schools. So…the gradual but inexorable move to the natural role of indoctrination, except that in America it was not about order or behavior, but about ideology…the ideology of the Left. And that is the origin of what this article is all about. The Left favors an authoritarian shutting down of opposing viewpoints and Constitutional Free Speech. And this is one of the tools to achieve that uniformity.
Unless/until we can get rid of them, we desperately need cons/trads in public schools. People recommend home schooling and private– sure, but that’s leaving out the feral kids whose parent’s don’t care– the ones that will be attacking our kids. So for society’s sake, we need to take back the schools.
Esp important–mid-life career changers with their heads on right, who remember how life used to be and are not sucked in by PC ideologies. If you know anyone who really wants to make a difference, this is how.
Pls pass on? Thanks!