David McElroy

Nobody really noticed when a 9-year-old girl in Scotland started blogging in April about her school lunches. A couple of months later, she’s forced changes in her school’s lunch, embarrassed her local government and made the local politicians look like fools. It’s not a bad start.

Martha Payne had a simple idea. She wanted to take a picture of her school lunch each day and evaluate it, based on how she liked it and how healthy she thought it was. So NeverSeconds was born. Her mother is a physician and her father is a farmer, so it’s natural for her to think about food and health, because she’s grown up hearing about both.

As people started hearing about her blog and reading about it, school officials took notice. They even made some changes. By May 18, the school was allowing students to get unlimited salads, fruit and bread, which had always been the policy, but nobody had ever told the lunchroom workers.

So things were going well for Martha, who was posting anonymously as “Veg.” She was having a great time writing about her lunches. She was receiving pictures of other kids’ lunches from around the world. She had even started raising money to build a kitchen for a school in India. Then newspapers in Great Britain started writing about her project, pointing to the deficiencies of the food. That’s when the problems started.

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Dorothy knew things were bad when the twister carried her away from Kansas, but she suddenly understood just how bad things really were when she realized what her traveling companions really were.

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Why has the modern educational establishment become so obsessed with standardized testing and uniformity of measurement? When did so many people start believing that you could plot learning as numbers and graphs — and still teach children what they need to know?

That’s what I kept thinking as I read about a $1.1 million project to look into designing “galvanic skin response” bracelets for students to wear that would measure their degree of engagement with what they were listening to. The goal is to find out whether physiological feedback from these sensors could tell teachers whether students are learning or not.

If you’re not familiar with the phrase “galvanic skin response,” it’s just the name for the process of measuring how electricity flows through the skin depending on changes in moisture. It’s the principle upon which so-called lie detectors work. (Those things are bogus, but that’s another story entirely.)

Is this really the way some people believe we should decide whether kids are learning? Are we going to keep going until we strap a sensor helmet on kids every morning so we can monitor their thoughts for the full day?

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