Gates Foundation Tests Bracelet that Tracks Your Emotions

Regimentation of the masses is the only goal that makes sense out of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s studies that strap bracelets capable of monitoring arousal on students’ wrists.

by Heidi Stevenson

If you’ve wondered about the goals of Bill Gates and his foundation, the latest investment should clarify his intentions. He is funding two studies to measure students’ responses to their school lessons. They strap a bracelet that measures galvanic skin responses to provide information about students’ emotional responses to anything and everything.

One grant is to Clemson University in the amount of $498,055 to:

… conduct a pilot study to measure student engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets, which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices more broadly to help students and teachers.

The National Center on Timing & Learning Inc is the recipient of $621,265 to:

… measure engagement physiologically with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Galvanic Skin Response to determine correlations between each measure and develop a scale that differentiates different degrees or levels of engagement.

It’s all part of their Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), a program with the stated purpose of improving student achievement and helping teachers insure excellence. It sounds good, but what’s the benefit of strapping devices on students’ wrists to monitor their state of excitement?

The claimed idea behind the program is that they’ll find out when students are truly engaged with their learning. But that presumes that teachers aren’t already aware. As a person who has taught, I can state unequivocally that teachers most assuredly are fully aware when students are involved. No such invasive tools are needed.

What’s the Real Goal of These Studies?

Even more significant, though, is that there’s an assumption that students are aroused only by what’s going on with the teacher. So, exactly how do they plan to distinguish between the boy who’s enthralled with solving a math problem and the one who’s seeing the current girl of his dreams walk into the room? Or the girl who’s talking about her date last night?

The real purpose of these studies cannot possibly be to improve teaching. So what’s left? I think that the answer can be found in the work that’s preceded these studies. The Chicago Tribune reports:

The Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test scores. …

… Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson [Gates Foundation spokeswoman] acknowledged. “It’s hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this,” she said.

That alarms some educators who have long been critical of the Gates Foundation’s efforts to boil down effective teaching to an algorithm.

Clearly, Gates is working towards creating a regimented system in which all teaching is done in the same manner. The studies that the Gates Foundation has done up to now all point to a goal of finding a single “best” way to teach, and a single standard to which students are expected to adhere.

Regimentation of the masses is the real goal. The only thing that really makes sense is getting people to acquiesce to devices that invade every aspect of their lives. Devices that can track us wherever we go. Devices that can monitor our moods. Ultimately, perhaps devices—and vaccines and drugs—that turn us all into virtual zombies: eager consumers and willing slaves.

Of course, the researchers say otherwise. According to Forbes, Clemson assistant professor Shaundra Daily said:

Optimally, our goal is to support empathy and understanding in the classroom. With so many empathetic teachers out there, we want to continue to find ways to help support these types of practices. We hope that there would be a tool to measure engagement and provide teachers and students something they can look to for real-time (reflective feedback), kind of like a pedometer.

Did she really say that the goal is to “support empathy and understanding” by strapping invasive devices on students’ wrists and measuring responses? Are we supposed to believe that empathy is something that can respond to an algorithm and be managed like a computer?

Perhaps she believes that, but it truly stretches the bounds of reason.

Little room is left for any conclusion other than that the Gates Foundation’s goal is to regiment everyone but the elite few using whatever means can be devised. Empathy does not exist in such a world.

Tagged bill & melinda gates foundation, gates foundation, gates foundation bracelet, gates foundation classroom, gates foundation galvanic skin response bracelet, gates foundation grants, gates foundation studies, politics, pseudo-science, pseudoscience