Surveillance-based schooling constructs individuality only as a position in a sequence

Evidence

As with the Lancaster school, an essential aspect of this discipline is the act of inspection. At 5.15 every morning students are woken up to stand and be inspected. Their written work is submitted to a similar inspection, and their work and behaviour is under constant surveillance. In the classroom they are to stay attentive, and any act that distracts attention will be penalised. Even to talk, at any point except when authorised, is forbidden. The effect is a rigorous discipline of movement, sound and gesture. These separate acts of supervision and discipline combine to position and articulate each individual. He is endowed with an individuality that exists only in the act of obedience, or by virtue of position in a sequence. A person’s name, which he is constantly required to repeat, becomes something new – a label attached to an object, a liability attached to a piece of written work, or a moment in the sequence of the roll call. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 262

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that inspection and constant surveillance do not liberate the individual but produce ‘an individuality that exists only in the act of obedience’ inverts the standard narrative of education as self-formation — sits with it a while.
• XREF: Directly parallels Foucault’s panopticon and the disciplinary production of the modern subject; also connects to the earlier chapter on Lancaster monitorial schools. — connects to: Unfettered surveillance capital, not democratic law, decides the division of learning — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1028; Schools normalize surveillant software by passively adopting it — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 540; Schools reward discipline and subordinacy regardless of their effect on achievement — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 505 (+4 more)