06/11/08
I Know What You Did Last Math Class
A recent article – “I Know What You Did Last Math Class” by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times, Sunday May 4, ’08 – really grabbed me, and not in a good way. It’s about online programs such as ParentConnect, Edline, PowerSchool that allow parents (and kids, themselves) to monitor grades, attendance, failure to turn in homework and test scores in real time. More and more schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, are making this software available, and more and more parents are using the information to confront their kids about school work on a daily basis.
I guess this is a welcome tool for helicopter parents and the ultimate manifestation of our SCAN trend “Parentensity” when it comes to kids and school. It may be on-trend now, but what does it mean for the future?
Before I go any further, let me say that I do “get it”; in the right hands this can be an excellent way to guide our children and keep them on track in an ever more competitive world (part of me wishes I had it when my son was in school). And it can empower kids to take control of their school performance as never before. Perhaps some of you have access to this software from your kids’ schools and if you do, I’d love to hear about your experiences with it and how your kids feel about it.
I do see the necessity of its role, but it is another way in which technology is changing the daily lives of families in such a fundamental way that the social values of our children will be shaped, in part, by this development. Are we thinking enough about what that might mean?
In SCAN, when we do our analysis of generations and their values, we begin by defining all the forces that shaped their growing up years – economic, social, political, technological, cultural. So in thinking about the values of the very next adult generation, we have to factor in the daily possibility of surveillance and being called out on even such mundane missteps as being late for a class. Today’s teens and tweens will enter the workforce, the marketplace, the military, the government and the entertainment industry starting, well, just about tomorrow. What social values will they have about privacy, about authority, about criticism, about child-rearing and parent-child relationships, about the relationship between employer and employee, marketer and consumer?
I can’t help but wonder what George Orwell would say? In the book 1984, Big Brother was the government; in the year 2008, it’s beginning to look like mom!