 We’ve reported extensively on how high schools across the United States are monitoring the communications of students for the sake of “safety.” Now an anonymous teacher in the United Kingdom, after learning that a system called Senso secretly monitors whatever students or staff type, explains his concerns about privacy – but also, much more. From Unherd: “At first, I thought my reaction was about privacy. Partly, it was. But what lingered – what I kept turning over – was something else. A kind of moral labour was being handed over to a machine: the quiet discipline of noticing, of staying with another person’s experience, of holding their reality in mind. And no one seemed to notice, or care. “What I was seeing – or rather, what was vanishing – was a form of attention. Not just focus or vigilance, but something older and more human. The effort to see someone in their full, contradictory reality – not as a data point, a red flag, or a procedural category … “Tools like Senso make that trade easy – and invisible. They train us to scan for risk, not to remain with the person. Moral attention is the ground of judgement, the beginning of care. It is also a stance of active presence: an effort to refuse reducing the person in front of us to the signals a system is designed to detect. “As Simone Weil wrote: ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ It is not just noticing – it is the effort to see someone else as they are, without turning away … “Sociologists have long recognised that moral life depends not only on individual decisions, but on shared structures. When those structures weaken – when proximity is replaced by process – something shifts. The moral weight of a situation is no longer felt; it is processed. As judgement is replaced by assessment, the capacity for care erodes.” Comments are closed.
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