Beyond Bathroom Surveillance: Schools as Incubators of Human Skills and Positive Human and AI Collaboration

Everybody knows that 'smokin ain't allowed in school

While students sit in English class reading George Orwell’s 1984, many of their schools have started to move toward dystopian AI e-hall pass systems that allow them to track all student movement in the hallways and solve the decade-old problem of ‘smokin in the boys room that has bedeviled educators for decades and putting the American empire at-risk.

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It is somewhat surprising to me that we can figure out how to implement systems that monitor students’ usage of the bathroom while protecting their privacy, but we cannot figure out how to let students use generative AI in school without protecting their privacy.

Now, there is a simple reason that we can collect this bowel movement data while protecting their privacy, at least from those outside the school system: the vendors of these systems use enterprise solutions to keep the data walled off from peeping data-Toms in the cloud. This is the same way a school could implement (or contract to implement) a GAI academic tools system.

So, if we can use AI to monitor bathroom usage, we can also let students use AI at school.

If a school is short on funds to implement at-school AI for students, they could substitute the bathroom AIs, as the case for them is quite weak.

Advocates of these bathroom systems argue that it is important to reduce the time the students spend in the bathroom wasting time, vaping, or engaging in Tik-Tok-inspired damage, which isn’t that much of a thing anymore and is probably less expensive to fix than the surveillance systems themselves.

But there is also the academic side. Supposedly, if the students who waste time in the bathroom because they don’t want to return to class have their bathroom minutes reduced by this system, they will learn more in the classes they are avoiding like the plague by choosing to spend time in a bathroom stall rather than a classroom.

Beyond the fact that the kids probably don’t go back and pay attention, the big problem is that when they return to class, they can’t learn about the most important thing facing their future: AI, because student access to AI tools is often blocked for, yes, privacy reasons.

Even if there are no security or academic gains, perhaps the AI bathroom systems make the kids happy, as the advertisements show. But are the kids actually happy? What kid is happy that their bathroom activity and every movement in the hallway tracked?

Do administrators and teachers also want their bathroom usage tracked by AI?

And this is magnified by the extreme punishments that are often handed-down.

And does it reduce vaping—the other argument for these systems? No. Because they can still use the bathroom during school, though perhaps a bit less, especially if they also install vaping sensors and send administrators flying into the bathroom at the first alarm. But, more importantly, they can just vape more when they leave school.

And why are kids vaping? Has anyone stopped to ask that question? Are they more or less likely to vape when they are unprepared for their future? Or when they have to sit in class and write a paper in a blue book with a pencil? Are they more or less connected to the adults in their school because of AI surveillance (remember, supposedly AI tutors don’t work because kids need the human connection—you know, the one that is facilitated by monitoring their bathroom usage with AI and doling out extreme punishments for vaping)?

Are NAEP scores down because they are spending too much time in the bathroom or because kids don’t think school is relevant to their lives? Or is it because they spend 5 hours a day on social media? Or is it because inequality is increasing, wealth is concentrated at the top, aggravated social conditions are undermining education, and politicians devote thousands of hours to keeping books out of their libraries and trying to erase some of their identities?

And where does this end? In academic 1984? There are plenty of companies lining up to sell school surveillance systems.

Surveillance systems are relatively easy for schools to implement because they fit within the current grammar of industrial education: monitoring, control, and time-on-task. If we still needed significant numbers of workers for factories, then maybe this would be a good idea, but we are way beyond factories, into a world of flexible, distributed, and entrepreneurial work, and the education model needs to change to reflect that. We need to invest our resources in breaking out of this model, not reinforcing it, and the fact that we can implement excretion surveillance systems while protecting our students’ privacy and security means we can find a way for them to appropriately access generative AI tools and prepare them for the future.

There are a number of ways schools can productively invest resources in AI to move beyond this model.

First, schools can invest limited resources in programs that are designed to amplify human potential (PBL, debate, entrepreneurship, AI literacy, portfolio development) that help them develop the essential durable skills (communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and cultural context) that are already needed in today’s world and will be needed even more in the AI World.

Second, schools can invest in AI tools that enhance instructional opportunities in these areas. In a recent MIT Open Learning about about generative AI and the future of education,

Panelists emphasized the importance of fostering opportunities where learners can become creative, collaborative, and curious thinkers. With this in mind, educators could leverage generative AI in their teaching to foster higher-level skills such as critical thinking, analysis, and strategy….Pattie Maes, Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab, has been thinking about the future and the ways that AI could play a role in learning. When asked about her moonshot, Maes envisioned a context-aware device that is with learners at all times, so its educational assistance would be informed by learners’ experiences. The device could serve as “a mentor, thought-provoker, encouraging you to see things differently and go deeper,” Maes said.

Third, schools can invest in AI literacy and AI tools training that will help students prepare for the workforce. We know from the adoption of bathroom systems that this is possible.

This combination of human and AI As noted in a January 26th article by Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, a combination of people skills and AI skills are the most important job skills for 2024.

2024 will start to usher in a new world of work where people skills—problem solving, empathy, and active listening to name just three—are more core to career success, and people-to-people collaboration is more core to company success…In 2024, leaders will lean into this ever-evolving technology while simultaneously empowering their employees, and people will align their skill-building and continuing education with AI skills and practical people skills. The result will be a new world of work that’s more human and more fulfilling than ever before.

This is the world we need to prepare our students for, and this is where we need to focus our resources.

In our 350-page free report, we outline how to do this in more detail. It is something all schools can do if they are willing to invest resources in breaking the mold of a surveillance-driven industrial education system.

Everbody knows that ‘Smokin ain’t allowed in school…