Punitive Pedagogy and the Political Economy of the Surveillance School

Surveillance Schools are emerging around the globe characterised by new technologies and practices that identify, verify, categorise and track pupils in ways never before thought possible. The school gates have been opened to a variety of surveillance technologies including CCTV, metal detectors, fingerprinting, online monitoring, facial recognition and palm vein scanners, to name just a few. Of course, Surveillance Schools are not just comprised of technological apparatus, many have full time uniformed police officers, armed in some countries, patrolling the corridors and classrooms, they subscribe to random drug testing and use sniffer dogs to search students and their possessions stored in transparent lockers and bags. Taking schools as microcosms of society, they can provide us with a prophetic glimpse into an emerging penal vista characterised by surveillance, containment and control. Set against this backdrop, the paper examines the new penal pedagogies and corporate priorities that have increasingly flowed into schools as successive waves of neoliberalism have come to shape the political landscape. Corporate schemas increasingly pervade schools, reclassifying citizens as consumers and aligning education with the needs of the post-industrial market. As the Surveillance School assesses pupils according to their value as ‘human capital’ (Apple, 1998) they are sorted into two ideal types; complacent ‘worker-consumers’ and ‘market rejects’; those that are disposed to poverty, or in the most extreme cases face a direct and expedited channel from the school to prison. The paper debunks the meritocratic myth to argue that the school-to-workplace pipeline has bottle-necked as neoliberalism desiccates jobs. The school production line is no longer only routed to the industrial workplace, but rather prisons have become the relief valve, filtering off the already marginalised poor into carceral warehouses.