Data-gathering has often been seen as the preserve of the pen-pusher, the faceless bureaucrat fuelling a joyless obsession with rules and numbers. For more free-spirited souls, it has been a nuisance at best, a deeply sinister form of social control at worst - a gamut that runs from parking inspectors to the Stasi.
Hence the deep distrust of many educators when they are told to provide data, or when data is extracted from their endeavours. The accumulation of data is seen as the harbinger of target-driven approaches, which, whether in the form of school league tables or test scores that set children on different educational paths, are anathema to teachers.
So, at first sight, the concerns expressed by outgoing EIS president Nicola Fisher at her union’s AGM in Dundee last week seemed nothing new. It was just that new forms of data collection had been found to worry about, with the advent of national standardised assessments and the bureaucracy associated with the Pupil Equity Fund.
“This growing obsession with data runs contrary to the ethos of Curriculum for Excellence,” said Fisher. The EIS education convener, Susan Quinn, noted that data was “an increasing part of the everyday life of the teacher” and had turned out to be a “hot topic” of the AGM.
One teacher at the meeting warned against “reducing young lives to raw data”, as this would “undermine professional judgement”. Another feared an “Orwellian nightmare” of data being used against teachers, while others said the Show My Homework online network was being utilised by some heads to monitor their staff.
‘A new obsession’
Once upon a time, you could at least have a go at resisting uses of data that you viewed as pernicious - you could refuse to take part in tests, decline to hand over personal details. Now, however, data is everywhere, coursing through our lives with incredible speed, and willingly volunteered every time we search Google, like a Facebook post or share a piece of salacious gossip on WhatsApp.
When Fisher said at the AGM that “we seem to be present at the dawn of a new obsession with data”, she was referring to Scottish education but her comments could be applied globally and far beyond the classroom.
The historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus, predicts the end of the old idea of data as “only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity”, in which humans change data into information, knowledge and then wisdom.
And there is an increasingly common belief that humans cannot cope with the “immense flows of data” now surging around the world. This view is promulgated by “dataists”, whom Harari paints as having an almost evangelical zeal for ceasing any restrictions on the flow of data and for entrusting data-processing to computer algorithms; the extreme end of this worldview is that humans should eventually “create an all-encompassing data-processing system - and then merge into it”.
This may seem like the fanciful mutterings of a fringe group, but in the 1950s people thought the same about the Chicago school of economics and the belief of its adherents in unfettered markets, which quickly colonised mainstream politics - perhaps dataists will have their own Margaret Thatcher within a decade or two.
Data is surging around the world in unprecedented, unfathomable volumes. Even if standardised tests and excessively detailed funding application forms are opposed by the teachers of the future, governments may just pluck out other forms of education data to suit their purposes, like diners at a sushi restaurant. The question is whether teachers will feel liberated in this age of data - or become slaves to it.
Henry Hepburn is the Tes Scotland news editor