Surveillance Schools ― Security, Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education

With the growth of surveillance technologies globally, Taylor focuses on the phenomenon of the Surveillance School and explores the impact that continual monitoring is having upon school children, education and society.

Surveillance Schools are characterised by routine practices that identify, verify, categorise and track pupils. With biometric technologies such as fingerprinting and iris scanning, CCTV, microchips in ID cards and 'smart uniforms', metal detectors and police officers patrolling the school corridors with sniffer dogs, it is clear that schools have become increasingly fortified.

Taylor outlines the phenomenon of the Surveillance School, mapping the driving forces behind them and analyses the impact. The evidence emerging from empirical studies suggests that often these technologies do little to safeguard young people, do not represent financial savings or increased efficiency, but serve to strip pupils of their privacy, undermine their trust in others and create an atmosphere of suspicion.

This insightful research ultimately questions whether the incessant use of omnipresent technological surveillance has the ability to displace the very building blocks of democratic society. Taylor presents the school as a microcosm of society and invites us to experience a prophetic glance into the future of the surveillance society.

Emmeline Taylor is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University. She specialises in surveillance, crime and criminal justice and has been mapping, with increasing concern, the integration of surveillance practices into pedagogical apparatus in schools over the past decade.