Thursday, December 20, 2007

School trips...?

Apparently "Fingerprinting helps pupils to be healthy eaters" states the "This is Cheshire" website. The school is so chuffed with the technology that they are "now looking at ways of using the fingertip system for other purposes for example school trips."

Education helps children to be healthy eaters. Taking fizzy drinks and chips off the menu helps children to be healthy eaters. These systems can cost up to £20,000+. Could this amount of money be used in school to improve education of healthy eating habits?

There is no mention of fingerprint, biometric, scanner or even cashless on Sandbach school's website. Taking childrens biometric data from them, I would have thought, warrents a mention at least.

But the idea of incorporating fingerprint scanners into a school trip(!) seems to be a biometric overkill of technology for technologies sake.

Given the appalling track record government establishments have on data protection, just salient data should be held by schools - not children's biometric data, which is non essential for a child's education.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Pippa,
keep up the good work :-)

The basic level of fingerprints for the reward of food (is,in my opinion) based upon Ivan Pavlov psychology.
Just for the benefit of anyone who may be unfamiliar with Pavlov's work. Most of his research involved temperament, conditioning and involuntary reflex actions.

Obviously parents can do their own research on this. But let's also remember that Pavlovian conditioning was a major theme in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World,
Best wishes
Morley Parents