Conversations/Path B
Path: household and school
A season of 4–6 gatherings · Parents, teachers, students
Schools are being sold tutors and detectors. Households are already negotiating phones. This path holds education, fairness, and privacy together.
Opening question
What decision about a child's learning or ranking is already being made by a system none of us can see?
To hold together
- Who is allowed to refuse a classroom tool?
- What should a parent be able to ask a school about a score?
- Where is help, and where is surveillance wearing the face of help?
A practice
Bring one school policy, or the absence of one. Map it onto two families. Write three questions the next staff meeting could actually hold.
Concerns to name in the room
Principles to sit beside the facts
Stewardship
Hold what is built in trust for those who will live with it.
Justice
Who is heard, who is harmed, and who decides.
Prudence
Small, reversible steps before irreversible ones.
Read or watch beforehand
One piece is enough. Save the rest for later.
Justin Reich
Director, Teaching Systems Lab · MIT
Failure to Disrupt is a sober history of education technology. A good companion when a school group is being sold a tutor.
Cathy O'Neil
Mathematician and writer
Weapons of Math Destruction is still the plainest account of scoring systems that punish the people least able to contest them.
Helen Nissenbaum
Professor · Cornell Tech
Contextual integrity: privacy is not secrecy, it is appropriate flow. The idea that lets a mixed group talk about data without collapsing into 'share nothing.'