It has already been explored before in these pages how algorithms and computational thinking have affected how we have organised learning (see Computationalism | Heritage | Teacher learning conference and Computationalism | Culturalism | Teacher learning conference). The relationship between digital precision and cultural fuzziness defines the production, reproduction and dysfunction of human practices today across many endeavours, not just those relating to formal education. The story of the 39 postmasters who have recently had their convictions for fraud quashed is a particular case in point and yet another warning about what can go wrong if we do not understand the algorithms and cultural practices that define our participation (for the full story see: Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared – BBC News).
In a brief summary, this ghastly story concerns a number of postmasters who had been convicted of and subsequently imprisoned for fraud following accusations of financial impropriety while they were managing regional post offices. The central evidence in their conviction was provided by a computerised accounts management system called Horizon which had been installed on post office platforms since 1999. The accusations of fraud were vigorously contested but – and this is the important bit – the evidence from the computer system was deemed to be foolproof and incapable of error and so it was favoured over the professional integrity, experience and decency of highly skilled humans. As it happened, flaws have since been uncovered in the computer system rendering its data quite unreliable and only now, in April 2021, have the convictions in many of these cases been overturned. This is of course small consolation for those who suffered institutionalised bullying, personal disgrace, loss of employment and imprisonment and have fought for many years to clear their names. This atrocity is an example of what can happen when a zealous and misplaced faith in technology is privileged over faith in human beings. Here we can see in the most dramatic terms, the dysfunction, harm and cruelty that can accompany a computational and technological take-over of institutional culture.
The overturning of these court judgements was greeted with astonishment and shock among the pundits in the media when it broke. Yet perhaps we should not have been so surprised. Technology has a capacity to generate blinkered fervour in its advocates, and has a track record throughout history of facilitating atrocities in the name of human progress. The uneasy and yet essential relationship between scientific research, technology development and ethics is one that those benefitting from the results of new technology have only recently embraced. There are many examples of ethical considerations being neglected and horrifying harm being done as a result in the fields of nuclear science, genome technology, and medicine to name but a few.
Please don’t misinterpret me here. I am not saying that technology inevitably does harm. Nor am I advocating a futile and puritanical absolution from all technology either. I am advocating instead that brakes and caution should be applied when the blinkered scales of excitement form in the eyes of those developing and advocating new technology. This is so wonderfully captured in the 1768 Joseph Wright of Derby oil painting Experiment on a bird in an air-pump. In this painting the human anthropology of discovery is uniquely and prophetically captured. There is the flame haired scientist driven by the obsessions of knowledge and revelling in the exhibition of scientific law, emptying a glass vessel of its air containing a small bird gradually asphyxiating to death. Around the table watching this horrifying experiment are various shades of human indifference. There is a young couple on the left more interested in each other than the experiment in front of them, the passing interest of two others on the left who appear to be watching but not particularly caring, and there is the man on the right steeped in himself, his own worries and concerns and not even watching what is happening to the bird. These are the bystanders who have a responsibility to apply those brakes but as so often happens choose not to out of pure indifference. It is a frightening and sobering visual evocation of the maxim ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.’ It is only the two little girls who act as the voice of humanity and who seem to be horrified by what is happening. However, as children they are powerless and disenfranchised and unable to stop the unfolding scene. Notice the arms of the man round the older girl’s shoulders that try to console her as she cannot watch. They seem to be suggesting their feelings are mere childish sentimentality and are nothing compared to the importance of learning the laws of science. Here we can see fervour, blind faith, indifference and ignored protest all combining to allow the pursuit of knowledge and technology to do whatever it wants. This may be ‘scientific progress’ of sorts but it is also profound folly and ignorance undertaken in this way.
The Post Office story is a frightful real-world demonstration of the very same process. Fervour from those who marketed and then purchased the Horizon platform; blind faith in the reliability of its data; the indifference of the bystanders who could have helped; and protests of victims ignored by the tribunals and law courts all combining to facilitate an atrocity and endorse data bullying of this kind elsewhere.
Stories like these make me profoundly anxious about educational culture and the ever-increasing proliferation of performance data. I saw exactly the same enthusiastic zeal in the eyes of data managers who began to be employed by schools from 2000s. Words and phrases like ‘awesome’, ‘incredibly powerful’, ‘amazing’, ‘unprecedented access to information’ were banded about with the air and excitement of being amidst a genuinely revolutionary paradigm shift. Accompanying this, data management systems like Yellis, ALPS, ALICE, Fischer Family Trust, Sisra and so on have come into being and since become household names within school work places. The data these platforms hold are quite disturbingly detailed. Pupils’ exam results, assumed ‘rates of progress’ through attainment targets, projections of a child’s likely rate of progress given certain variables, and individual teacher’s ‘scores’ based on the performance of their classes, among much else besides. The use of this data heralded many of the same institutional tendencies present in the Post Office story. For example, school management trusting the data and what it suggested about pupils’ outcomes over the professional judgement of teachers; data being used as a surveillance tool by management to appraise the performance of staff; indifference to feelings of persecution among those whose ‘data’ did not look good; a distinct lack of discussion and understanding of what the data meant and what individuals and schools could actually do about it.
I remember whole staff meetings in the first day back in September, when the data managers would guide us all through the highlights and lowlights of the performance scores from the recent round of examinations. On the slides were very clear, often named subject areas, classes and individual pupils who were either green, amber or – horror of horrors – red. Around the room were the pricked up ears and sweaty palms of paranoia and conjecture about who may have been the teachers responsible for all the reds. If you were one of them you would face the inner turmoil at not quite being named as the weak link, but everyone knew who you were, or at least would in good time. I remember a particularly aggressive data manager who while going through the slides would become shrill and accusatory when inferring conclusions from the red columns. He even uttered the words on a high crescendo ‘THERE IS NO HIDING PLACE’ – implying that he was going to ‘find you out’ and ‘denounce’ you as harmful to the aspirations of young children – perhaps even ‘enemies of promise’ to quote a Secretary of State for Education at around the time. It is hard to find any other phrase for this than institutionalised bullying.
I also remember the hapless attempts by colleagues, including myself, to suggest that the data itself should be open to scrutiny and should be questioned. After all there was absolutely no transparency at all in relation to how the data was obtained, nor the methodologies used to crunch it and interpret it. It was simply given, served up as facts and truths, and incapable of error. Yet these attempts to question, which were surely desirable examples of professional engagement and expressions of professional expertise, were given short shrift. The way the Post Office used the data from the Horizon system to bully and prosecute those poor Postmasters and ignore their protestations is no different. Teachers do not get imprisoned for poor performance data but their lives are often made very difficult and just as often they will be given limited genuine opportunity to understand why the data is saying what it is saying and make informed professional decisions about what needs to happen. Instead, often, the teacher is left to believe that they are not effective or competent and eventually they will leave the profession. In the last ten years I have never known so many talented, intelligent, gifted teachers with huge potential to inspire young children leave the profession. More often than not they cite a culture of data bullying, or words to that effect, as reasons why. I wonder how many more tragedies need to happen before we can genuinely learn the lessons that need to be learnt from this. Joseph Wright of Derby knew this lesson in 1768 and the final shocking culmination of the things that could happen if we don’t are encapsulated in the following letter which I have found quoted repeatedly on websites but I do not know the original attribution.
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Woman and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human.
Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human
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