Call for submissions

By Jenny Valentish

From the outside, the dungeon is indistinguishable from the auto-repair shops that surround it. Upon pressing the buzzer at a discreet door you are led by the brothel manager through the gloom to a small reception room.

There, as you wait for your fetish provider, you might flip through the book of services. These include electrical play, sensory deprivation, food sploshing, suspension, medical procedures, cuckolding, public humiliation and babyism. There’s a poster on the wall that warns “no condom, no sex”. Sex? How pedestrian.

But what can fetish providers do in the era of social distancing? On March 23, the owner of this Melbourne dungeon emailed its workers to say that the premises would be closed until further notice. On March 25, sexon-premises venues in Victoria were ordered closed by the state government, although private workers were still allowed to operate independently, with the caveat that “no more than two people should share a space of eight metres squared”. On April 1, that changed. Up to $19,826.40 in penalties would apply if a sex worker was caught seeing clients.

Pre COVID-19, you’d find Sir James in such a dungeon, in a uniform of crisp shirt, leather braces, black pants, lace-up boots and surgical gloves. The tools of his trade were paddles and anal hooks. Now he’s manning different tools in his shed, using lockdown to focus on what had previously been more of a hobby: making and selling leather harnesses, straps and leashes for BDSM play (bondage, domination and sadomasochism).

“I’ve gone from working 30 hours a week as a professional Dom to basically nothing,” he says. “Luckily I’ve saved up a decent amount.”

Sir James says he’s proud of the way sex workers at the dungeon he works out of were aggressively on the ball as soon as the severity of COVID-19 became apparent. “Management were asking our opinion, but all the workers – no matter how badly off they were – immediately wanted to do their part and stop working, even when the government wasn’t taking any sort of decisive action.”

Brothels aren’t likely to utilise Jobkeeper to keep sex workers on board, as it’s more convenient to view sex workers as tenants. Some may be eligible for Jobseeker, and the Australian Sex Workers Association – known as Scarlet Alliance – has set up an emergency support fund.

“Every sex worker I know is actually a subcontractor, paying rent to use the space,” says Sir James. “It offers some freedoms for the worker, but it does make it harder to survive during an event like this or during any downturn.”

Still, he says, “Having worked for everything from software engineering to furniture removal, I can’t say sex work is any worse as an industry.”

It’s likely that Sir James’s clients would be feeling an extra need to see him during this time of anxiety. It might sound odd, he says, but many people come to a dungeon to feel safe, in the same way that you feel the safest when you’ve come down to earth after a bungee jump. The previous moments were exhilarating, even frightening, but you were in safe hands and you survived. Those BDSM clients who are additionally into corporal punishment or other pain-play will be missing the endorphin release that can serve as stress relief.

“I’ve noticed I’m really missing that sort of interaction too,” says Sir James. “There’s a massive hole in my personality where there should be really intense emotional and sexual experiences. It definitely makes me more stressed out.”

Before lockdown hit, Mia Walsch was working on reception at a dungeon, as well as seeing regular clients by appointment.

“The other day I got my work clothes out of my bag and hung them up in my wardrobe and wondered when I’d get to wear them again,” she mourns. “I don’t think I’d be good in a video setting. I prefer the one-onone, or two, or whatever. For me, the thrill of the session comes from the buzz in the air and the electricity in my fingertips.”

Walsch does have a regular client who has provided some financial support without expectations, allowing her to buy groceries and pay bills. “It’s so kind, unexpected, and I’m extremely grateful,” Walsch says. “Some clients, especially regulars, you build a real relationship with. Mine become like good friends that I hurt sometimes. It’s really lovely to know that I’ve been an important part of their lives, enough that they might want to help me out when things get rough.”

In July, Walsch’s memoir will be published. Money for Something: Sex Work. Drugs. Life. Need. details with gritty humour her life as a sex worker. She’s psyching herself up to start talking frankly about all that, but in the meantime, she’s finding she can apply her Domme

skills to lockdown surprisingly well. Her bondage work is proving handy in the garden and the house is faultlessly sanitised.

“I have a sound knowledge of cross-contamination, from cleaning dungeons all those years,” she says.

Mistress Audrey Fatale usually works out of a space in a Collingwood brothel. During lockdown, she’s seeing a few longstanding clients – mostly older men who are submissives – via Skype calls. It does limit things somewhat.

Her main client is “Rubber Slave”. He’ll wear his latex suit, while Fatale wears plastic underwear, a plastic boilersuit and a plastic raincoat. “He’ll say, ‘Are you wearing your plastic underwear, Mistress?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes I am.’ ‘How many pairs have you got on?’ ‘I’ve got two pairs on today.’”

Fatale says that when COVID-19 shut down her industry she developed anxiety around competition, which had never concerned her before. “All of a sudden there was this massive expulsion on Twitter from all the Dommes and sex workers: ‘I’m online! I’m doing Skype! I’m doing phone sessions! I’m doing custom sex!’ I started to get really anxious around how I was going to find my place, because it doesn’t resonate with me. It tends to attract the type of clients I’m not interested in – fly-bynight wankers who are feeling horny and just want you to perform for their fantasy. You reach a bigger audience, but to what end? Suddenly you become a caricature.”

Instead, she’s decided to try two new directions. The first draws on her therapeutic background. Fatale worked for eight years as a counsellor and case manager in grief and trauma while simultaneously working as a part-time Domme.

“Over the years I’ve attracted clients that really want to talk, and the psychological aspect is a big part of the established relationship,” she says. A session might involve exploring the deepening of the client’s submission, the writing of contracts, the reporting on the minutiae of their day-to-day life through spreadsheets on diet, exercise and masturbation habits. “So that’s probably more what the online sessions will look like at this point in time.”

Fatale is also considering recording educational videos and uploading them to Youtube – a kind of Slave 101. “It would essentially be, ‘This is what to expect from a session, this is how to behave.’ I’m swaying towards that. It’s just that these things don’t happen overnight, particularly when you’re technologically disadvantaged,” she says. “I’m still waiting to find a tech slave – I’d call him ‘The Boy’.”

Those BDSM clients who are additionally into corporal punishment or other painplay will be missing the endorphin release.

Illustrations by Jack Costello

It wasn’t sent to us, at least not directly, but we decided to pretend it had been. “As we often ask our children to do their best,” the principal at a state primary school in Melbourne’s west had written in the second week of April, “we now ask that of our parents. But please do not let it become too overbearing or too difficult to the stage where it causes upset in the household – this does not assist anyone – child or parent.”

As my partner reads the letter, I watch the tension in his face ease. I also notice that his hair has greyed. Mine has too. We’re down to one income and even that has taken a battering. We’re rattled. Everyone is. For the first two weeks of lockdown I’d lie awake at night thinking of all the people and things I touched before I last saw my parents. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, was a refrain lodged in my head like a lewd joke.

“Ha,” my partner says, interrupting my thoughts. He reads aloud: “Schools have been directed to provide students with up to five hours of study per day.

Research and experience will tell us that a primaryschool child is usually good for about 2–3 hours of study at home per day – and that is a good day.”

“That makes sense,” he says. I agree. The entire letter makes sense. It is also striking for its simplicity, unencumbered with reams of information, apps and portals, or the tap-dance of public relations that so many state schools seem compelled to produce. Instead, this principal tells families that, contrary to the hype, this is not homeschooling, it is “crisis schooling”, and to “never underestimate” the implicit learning and value in ordinary home life: baking, drawing, bike rides, board games. As my partner finishes reading, he looks as I imagine I did when I had first read it. Relieved, reassured. Grateful.

We hear the rattle of a metal fence, the thump of bricks and scrape of metal from the street, and my partner passes the phone back to me, disappearing out the front door. Our kids are breaking into the building site again. I re-read the letter and find myself blinking back

tears. I don’t know why. I mean, I know these things. But it’s the last paragraph that really gets me.

“Having the kids home all day is often going to be difficult enough without having the burden of causing household disruptions because ‘you have to get your schoolwork done’. If there are times when you need to alter or change the program to make it better for everyone, please feel free to do so and together we can get the best out of a difficult time for us all.”

The tears spill over. And they annoy me in a way, the tears, because this was always our intention during the lockdown. Not to be snowballed by other people’s panic. To not only give the pandemic the pause it requires, but to do the same for each other. Then to hear a principal drawing on his own wisdom and experience, instead of department speech bubbles, telling families to take care without suggesting an app to fix it – well, it’s the nice things that often make you cry.

In the lead-up to Term 2 in the year of coronavirus, I asked parents of school-aged children, mainly from Australia’s largest school jurisdictions, New South Wales and Victoria, to forward me their schools’ learning plans send their children to school, while state premiers proffered different directives. Am I an “essential worker”? It became an almost existential query. If you’re a health worker, in emergency services, and so forth, said Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, then yes. But otherwise, no. Stay home.

In Victoria, at 9am, Wednesday, April 15, school began at home for most students. Astonishingly, and in spite of all the preceding correspondence, this was the same time many parents and carers were first made privy to what the day would involve. Bizarre, because most parents, particularly those of primary school–aged students, were required to deliver it.

Over the next fortnight the other states and territories began their learning from home programs.

“Maybe I’m an idiot,” one parent says to me, “but I hadn’t even thought about a printer … I don’t mind that we’re using worksheets, but they could have at least told us.” Or printed them out during the holidays and posted them, another parent suggests.

Some families, suddenly advocates for the vital role played by teachers, begin to demand that schools reopen, while others are surprised by the profoundly substandard lessons they have been supplied with.

video for that day is a Youtube link on how to make paper airplanes.

A secondary teacher finds the virtual conversation she’d been in with her students uploaded to Instagram, the scenario digitally altered thanks to a “tech-savvy” 13-year-old student.

A parent with two children at a private primary school says they are in their uniform and at their devices by 8.50am without any help at all.

I call a primary teacher in Sydney to see how she is faring. When the realities of COVID-19 started to hit home, she and the older cohort of teachers were used as an example to colleagues at a staff meeting. The assistant principal alluded to their resistance to Seesaw, a social media app for schools. You’re in for a steep learning curve, he said.

It was last year, BC (Before COVID), when the permission slip came home in the Year 1 student’s book bag, rumpled by excited hands. The seven-year-olds at a state primary school in Melbourne’s south-east were going on an excursion! But Kelly (names have been changed to preserve anonymity), the boy’s mother, was confused. “Apple Store Permission”, the excursion slip began. The kids were going to the Apple Store at the local shopping centre. Of the six bullet-point items Kelly was asked to consent to, two stood out:

I hereby consent to any and all photographs, interviews or video taken of my child, and hereby grant to Apple the right to use, publish, duplicate, transmit, display or copyright my child’s image, interview or video for any reasonable purpose related to the program. I shall have no right of approval, no claim to additional compensation, no right to enjoin Apple’s rights hereunder or to otherwise seek injunctive relief and no claim (including defamation or invasion of privacy) for any use, alteration, distortion or illusionary effect.

I have read and agreed to Apple’s Privacy Policy at www.apple.com/au/privacy/privacy-policy, which contains information on how Apple collects and uses my personal information, information I provide may be accessed by entities overseas to allow Apple to provide services throughout the world.

Kelly had read the permission slip twice, then laid it flat on the table, took a photo with her phone and sent it to me. “He is not going,” she told me. “One of us will take the day off work and take him somewhere, like, I don’t know, the museum?”

today the museum is closed. Almost everything is. Even fossicking at the rock pools at the beach isn’t an option.

We get a phone call from our six- and seven-yearolds’ primary school. They are automatically creating

Google G Suite logins for students to use for document sharing and the like. If we want to opt out, they need to know now. My partner relays this to me, the school still on the line. We stare at each other, well aware not everyone is getting this phone call. We queried the school’s information and communications technology (ICT) policy at the beginning of the year, and requested to know what apps they’re using in class. We had decided not to sign all and sundry digital consent forms. It was a kind of hubris, I’ve learnt, and as COVID-19 brings the country to a standstill, I feel briefly chastened.

“Anna?” my partner says. Thoughts dart between us. It takes an immense quelling of anxiety. We opt out.

for an Industry that reserves its highest regard for “disruption technology”, you could say COVID-19 has been the ultimate disrupter. According to Goldie Blumenstyk in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the global pandemic is edu-tech’s “black swan” moment, an “unforeseen event that changes everything”. It could be, she writes, more of a “catalyst for online education and other ed-tech tools than decades of punditry and self-serving corporate exhortations”.

It is curious, the way Blumenstyk words this. As if COVID-19, by being a genuine emergency and catalyst for remote learning, somehow redresses the stealth and all-in lobbying from the tech giants in the past decade. Because be it a black swan, a trojan horse or just a crappy time all round, it is possible that under the cover of this virus, almost every school student in Australia has been signed up to one or another private and opaque platform without much in the way of informed consent. It would be an understatement to say that the private vision for public education just got a few extra runs on the board.

at first, It was simply unease. That’s what parents tell me. A feeling that edu-tech was not what they had expected when their children began primary school. But then again, most figured, parenting is all about misguided assumptions and coming to terms with new realities. On this count, I agree: my children will eat three vegetables at dinner… well, make that two. Okay, one. Please? Still, parents’ unease about the sudden heavy presence of edu-tech in schooling lingered, but most assumed it was nothing a few queries to the school couldn’t clear up. And that’s when the can of worms was opened. Parents’ concerns varied. Among them were student privacy, informed consent, evidence-based pedagogy, the school’s own digital literacy capability and the sucking up of already limited funds. But they could all be paraphrased by a simple question: Who is deciding what tech is being used in class and on what basis?

The responses many parents received were similarly varied, but identical in their dismissiveness. Many schools inferred that querying parents were “antitechnology”; families found themselves awash with buzzwords such as “The Future is Digital”, “21st Century

Skills”, “Personalised Learning”, “Enhanced Collaboration”, “Unleashing Your Child’s Creativity”, and so on. One parent tells me she felt like she was inside an Apple advertisement when she and her husband met with the assistant principal in charge of IT at their children’s primary school.

Other parents were sent jumbled answers via email, which they soon discovered had been copied and pasted from the internet.

At a primary school in Sydney’s north, Kate, a mother of two and a computer systems manager, organised to meet with the principal, assistant principal and a few other parents to discuss their concerns about the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy for Year 3. They arrived to find several others in attendance, including an employee from a private tech company.

It was, Kate says, far from reassuring.

Technology has long played a role in Australian education: from the hand-cranked mimeograph (a precursor to photocopiers) to the television, and from handheld calculators to PCS, stuttering printers, vast operating systems and “IT people”. Whiteboards replaced chalkboards and in the early 2000s interactive whiteboards began to replace whiteboards.

In 2007, laptops became part of the mix when the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, announced the Digital Education Revolution, committing $2.4 billion over seven years. A national fund provided laptops loaded with Microsoft and Adobe software for all students in Year 9 and above, and further funds were divvied out to schools to access broadband, build infrastructure, buy hardware and develop their own ICT proficiency.

The revolution proved difficult, and critics accused the government of underfunding it and failing to think the scheme through.

Tablets first entered the educational fray in Rudd’s home state, Queensland, with the state education department’s chief information officer floating the possibility of using ipads before the device had even been launched. “When it [the ipad] becomes available in Australia,” David O’hagan told The Australian, “the department … will conduct an evaluation to determine its suitability for teaching and learning as well as network compatibility.”

Predictably, the Digital Education Revolution’s budget blew out. It also failed to hit its marks, said critics. In 2016, John Vallance, then headmaster of Sydney Grammar School, told The Australian the billions of dollars spent on digital technology in schools over the previous seven years had been a “scandalous waste of money”.

“It didn’t really do anything,” Vallance said, “except enrich Microsoft and Hewlett-packard and Apple. They’ve got very powerful lobby influence in the educational community.”

In 2014, when national funding for student devices was wound up, state-based BYOD policies were rolled out. Reporter Alexandra Smith wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald at the time, “While primary school students were asked to bring hand sanitiser, tissues and paper towel at the start of this year, public high school students were expected to turn up with their own ipad or laptop.”

Six years later, primary-school students are increasingly being asked to turn up to school with a digital device and a box of tissues, and many families – trusting the system – comply. But trust can erode.

Jacqueline, a mother of three, all at primary school in Sydney’s northern beaches, says her community is regularly called on to donate money and volunteer for fundraisers. In a relatively well-off area, the biannual school fete brings in about $80,000, and is delivered off the back of parents’ time and money.

“I enjoy it,” Jacqueline insists. But increasingly, as cuts are made to the school’s art and music programs, she is beginning to wonder where the money is going.

He laughs dryly. “I later found out this was their consultative process.”

From the way the principal was speaking, many parents at the meeting had come away thinking the BYOD policy was compulsory, Steven says. But he and others were pretty certain you couldn’t force parents to buy their children ipads. Steven consulted Victoria’s Department of Education and Training website and found the state’s policy on personal devices in schools.

“The ‘Personal Devices: Parent Payments Access’ policy?” I ask.

“Yeah, that one.”

I have it on my desk. It states that schools must “not mandate that a parent purchase or lease a device based on the adopted program; [and must] advise parents that while the school has a preferred model, they can choose whether or not to purchase or lease the device”.

Only two Victorian parents I spoke to for this essay had seen this policy, and they’d had to scour the state department’s website for it.

Another parent, with a child at a primary school on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, also uncovered the policy and posted it on the primary school’s Facebook page. It caused a furore as parents began to comment, saying and

seen themselves in the education sector. In 1982, Apple’s “Kids Can’t Wait” campaign saw a concerted and ultimately failed pitch to the US Congress to pass a donation act that would allow tech companies to donate equipment to schools and deduct it from their taxes. Congress refused. But for the most part, tech seemed content to market itself from the outside. In 2012, Google took it up a notch.

Previously a minor contender, with much of the school market held by Apple and Microsoft, Google decided to go straight to the source, hawking its wares to teachers and principals, and bypassing department protocols and oversight. It set up Google Educator Groups – a teacher-accreditation program – and enlisted teachers and schools to “share” their newfound love of Google’s products at conferences, symposiums and on social media.

Today, Google is a major source of devices in US schools – in 2015 it was revealed the default settings for Google’s Chromebook laptops provided to students collect data on web activity and send it to the company’s servers – but it wasn’t just the sales push that saw Google become an education powerhouse. It was the ace up Google’s sleeve: free giveaways. the first place. Consider the discovery in 2010 that Google’s street-mapping vehicles, which had been traversing a dozen countries during a three-year period, had been equipped with sophisticated wi-fi “sniffing” software, secretly collecting names, addresses and snippets of personal data including passwords, emails, text messages, and audio and video files.

Google said the practice was a simple mistake, however a Federal Communications Commission inquiry in the US revealed this misstep to be far more complicated and intentional than the company implied.

In an earlier court hearing, an American federal judge had ruled that the tech giant could be sued under the Wiretap Act; however, the commission squashed this ruling, concluding instead that Google could not be found liable as the data it had intercepted had been flowing, unencrypted, over open radio waves. The regulatory body fined Google US$25,000, not for eavesdropping but for its initial stonewalling of the investigation.

The company announced it had discontinued the practice. Which raises the question: What other Google practices might not survive transparency?

“Google is walking a very fine line,” David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, told NBC

informed regarding the school’s digital policy. At first, I’d assumed it was an education department program. But after finding no reference to it on the many state education and curriculum online rabbit holes, I typed it into a search engine.

The program is a three-year affiliation that schools can renew indefinitely, with the aim of eventually becoming an “Apple Distinguished School”, of which there are presently 38 in Australia. To be eligible, schools must demonstrate certain commitments. This includes that the school implements a “one-to-one Mac or ipad program for students and faculty”; that all students use Apple devices as their primary learning device and all teachers use Apple devices as their primary teaching device; and that the school “deeply integrates” Apple apps including Photos, imovie, Garageband, Keynote and ibooks Author. Schools also need to ensure Apple’s own lesson plans and learning materials are incorporated in the school’s curriculum.

There are Microsoft state schools too, advancing through “Pathfinder” and “Mentor” status in the hope of being designated a “Microsoft Showcase School”. Adobe has a point-scoring program for principals and teachers to become “Adobe Campus Leaders” and “Adobe Education Leaders”, the latter requiring individuals to have established a sharing network beyond their own school.

“They paid for everything,” a digital educator tells me, unabashed, as he describes how Adobe bankrolled his accommodation, flights, meals – “the whole bit” – to attend education conferences and make presentations to teachers. It appears that Apple, Microsoft and Adobe have learnt from Google’s dominating tactics in the US education market.

When I learnt the real origins of the Apple program, as well as its many strings attached, I felt sick. The effect it had on the deeply ingrained trust I had in my children’s school was devastating. A friend – a secondary-school teacher of media, coding and digital arts – chuckles wryly when I tell him about it. He has worked at a range of schools from private and middle-class state schools through to struggle town. “Apple,” he says, “seems to largely appeal to schools with a middle- and upperclass demographic – their products are social capital, basically.”

In other words, my predicament is privileged.

“It’s still shit,” I say, and he agrees.

“I don’t have Internet at home – I’ve never been able to afford it,” Melbourne dad David Robinson told the ABC in March, when it became clear a lockdown was imminent. Robinson and his family were looking down the barrel of remote learning without an internet connection, and he was convinced his two daughters, eight and 12 years old, would fall behind in their schooling. In the weeks since, the states have distributed digital devices, SIM cards and dongles to families such as the Robinsons to ensure they’re kept in touch with teaching programs.

It is a temporary bridge over what NSW’S Public Education Foundation executive director David Hetherington described on the ABC program as a “chasm”.

The digital divide, Hetherington said, is “bigger than most people think”.

Statistics prior to COVID-19 suggest that one out of six children were living in households below the poverty line, and the situation will be worse on the other side of this pandemic. And this, Mark Scott, the head of NSW education, tells me, is of great concern to his department. He explains that the education department recently invested in critical digital infrastructure in regional areas to improve broadband and wi-fi, and has funding to ensure that every school in the state has the ability to invest in technology.

All schools, says Scott, are well aware of what is expected of them. “Our curriculum expects a critical engagement with technology, and an ability to utilise its strengths but understand its challenges.” The guidelines are not intended to turn schools into “unblinking, unquestioning champions” of the tech companies.

The third-party relationships, Scott says, are monitored. When I ask how, he says it is done through feedback from schools and parents. This methodology, loosely echoed in state departments across the country, does not seem overly rigorous to me. While both the national ICT and digital technologies curriculums place enormous emphasis on students developing “computational” capabilities to collect, analyse and apply data (skills that can be taught unplugged as well as on a device), these same values don’t seem to resonate at a bureaucratic level.

Neither the NSW nor Victorian education departments have data on individual schools’ BYOD programs – no numbers on which schools have them, and in contract with which companies, for which devices and in which year levels. It seems like a neglectful oversight, but when I put this to a department bureaucrat in Victoria, he tells me the focus is on providing devices to schools in lower socioeconomic areas.

Scott reiterates this point. “I appreciate that some of the issues you’ve raised are that parents don’t want to be involved and how does that work,” Scott says tactfully. “As real for us is the question: What about kids at schools who don’t have these relationships?”

Again, there’s the inference of privilege. Having the agency to engage with the tech companies is a privilege. After our conversation, two thoughts tickertape through my head. First, if we have agency, then why do so many of the parents and teachers I speak to feel so helpless? Second, the digital divide doesn’t end by getting everyone on the internet. “The Rich See a Different Internet Than the Poor,” ran the headline on an article by Michael Fertik seven years ago in Scientific American, and if anything has changed since then, it’s that the segregation and division online has worsened.

Online, futures can be foreclosed.

Sure, wrote Fertik, there is the illusion of choice and control, but the internet is increasingly tailored and controlled by unseen hands. “Some laud this trend as

‘personalization’ – which sounds innocuous and fun, evoking the notion that the ads we see might appear in our favorite color schemes. What we are talking about, however, is much deeper and significantly more consequential.”

There can be consequences for the individual and also for democracy and its ongoing health. Data brokers don’t just trade with marketers, they trade with real-estate agents and landlords who want to investigate potential renters, with security groups and surveillance-software makers, with employers and employment agencies, with universities, credit agencies and insurers, and with political parties and their campaign consultants. The Cambridge Analytica saga revealed the extent to which the tech giants also trade with each other: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Huawei, for instance, are among the hundreds of companies to have purchased profiles from Facebook.

Australia’s esafety Commissioner promotes the American not-for-profit organisation Common Sense as a good resource for parents and educators. Like the “Student Data Privacy Pledge”, Common Sense was set up largely by the industry – its edu-tech investors included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative – and many parents who raise privacy concerns with schools are directed to visit the Common Sense Media website. And why not? The site can provide good explanations of various apps and, through a review process, grades each one’s suitability. For example, Google Classroom is given an approval grade of 88 per cent for overall privacy.

Read on, though, and you’ll find that Google just scraped through on data collection at 50 per cent – and this is on an industry-backed site. Imagine the score that might be awarded by an independent resource.

Clearly, digital skills are vital, especially for lower socioeconomic families vulnerable to the ways in which data can be used against them. But by allowing tech giants to determine what constitutes the necessary digital skills, and to convey a shallow harm-free concept of privacy and thus ensure their massive profits, we are accepting the creation of an unbridgeable and entrenched divide between us.

A principal says to me, carefully, that my concerns are philosophical. I understand her meaning: if parents don’t like a school’s policy, get out. But where do we go? I imagine us rock-hopping as schools sink underfoot, sucked into the mud of unseen and unchallenged influence. Is this philosophical? Am I making too much of it?

At the homes of friends who have children in older grades, I look at their ipads and go through the apps. On a maths app, a pirate is climbing a cliff as the app spits out sums – with each right answer, the pirate ascends; with each wrong answer, he falls down.

“Don’t you have to go back to the sum you got wrong and get it right?” I ask the boy. He shakes his head, and when the pirate falls a couple more times, he taps his finger irritably at the screen. “It’s glitching,” he says, closing the app.

A friend’s daughter shows me a slideshow about Harry Potter she’s been working on by dragging images off the web. It is, I have to say, very dull. When her mum and I check the device’s screen statistics and internet history we’re shocked to see she had spent two and a half hours on it in class.

One of the pedagogical perks of ipads, I am told, is that children can easily get up and move around with them. It was the centipedes of primary-school children walking in lines across the yard that first caught my eye, their arms forming crossbones, hugging ipads tight to their chests. They take their devices to physical education, to art, to all their special classes. At the zoo, groups of children in uniform run past enclosures, briefly stopping to take a photo with their devices before running off. It seems indecent. Cruel even. I catch up with a child and ask them what they’re doing. She shows me. They’re dragging the photos onto a map of the zoo. “That’s it?” I ask. She nods, then she’s off, pinballing between cages. It takes a while, but then it hits me.

This isn’t study; it’s data entry.

there Are two dominating themes in Australian education today: intense standardisation and assessment; and the wholesale embedding of digital technology across all school subjects, as reflected in the federal government’s ICT curriculum.

At a glance, the two themes appear unrelated.

The former, as is conducted through the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), has individual schools and teachers on a tight lead, summoning up images of government holding education to account, ensuring all children rise through the system hitting their marks. The latter, which places emphasis on “a knowledge-based economy … to be empowered within a technologically sophisticated society now and into the future” (according to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority), speaks to the idea of school autonomy, conjuring up images of individually tailored hothouses where teachers are empowered to observe students and create passionate lesson plans.

These two themes, however, have far more in common than meets the eye. Both are obsessed with data, that which is quantifiable, and both have a distinct commercial presence behind them. Sometimes, as is the case with Pearson, a former textbook publisher that has evolved into one of the world’s largest “edu-businesses”, the same company strives to straddle both discourses.

NAPLAN is predominantly administered by Pearson, working on multimillion-dollar contracts with curriculum agencies both federally and in most states to distribute, collect, scan and mark the tests. Government departments stipulate that Pearson does not prepare the tests, while the company itself has stated it is not involved in developing Australian policy around the test.

All of which gives the impression this is a hands-off operation.

Why, then, has Pearson developed a massive research arm dedicated to psychometrics, the science of measuring mental capabilities and processes?

In 2012, in an in-house newsletter, Pearson’s vicepresident of psychometrics and research services refers to the “pioneering” work of the Pearson Assessment Community, a group that had been, he writes, “charged with developing a global community of interest in assessment, content, and project management expertise to assist our Pearson colleagues worldwide in creating assessments in countries where none had previously existed”.

How to untangle the sales pitch from the evidence? Similarly, lobbying in Australia is far from transparent. It may be true that Pearson plays no role in Australian policy development, but this could be because it has already laid the groundwork elsewhere.

It was back in 2000 when British publisher Pearson acquired a leading American standardised testing provider. Within a year, the company had gone from nil dollars in the lobbying game to millions. Between 2009 and 2014, Pearson Education was one of four big connects non-profit organisations in the field of education to the vastly lucrative for-profit world of big business.”

In Australia, allegations of an unchecked revolving door between the public and private sectors regularly make the news, particularly in mining and defence. Last year, however, the finger was pointed at education – the Australian Education Union raised concerns regarding the recruitment to Pearson of Stanley Rabinowitz, previously at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

At ACARA for almost five years, Rabinowitz had been in charge of assessment and reporting, with responsibilities including the management of NAPLAN and sample tests, and national data reporting including the Myschool website. An American citizen, Rabinowitz previously worked at an education-sector not-for-profit organisation in San Francisco, at the head of their National Center for Standards and Assessment Implementation.

Now Rabinowitz is back in the US as senior technical adviser for Pearson. Depending how you look at it, his seems like a natural career trajectory or a criss-crossing

an American education writer, was quick to respond over Twitter: “You’re going to have a lot of young people whose family members and teachers died, you fucking ghoul.”

Edu-tech is portrayed as the rebel in learning, the provider of out-of-the-box thinking to placate the emphasis on standardisation. Edu-tech advocates are fond of sharing memes that portray classrooms as the outdated cogs of industrialism, where a teacher stands at the front like an orator while children sit homogenised and mute. “The digital revolution will change this,” is the meme’s message. Putting digital devices into students’ hands will turn them into active learners. The two most obvious ironies here are that the so-called digital revolution is industrialisation, and that a primary-school classroom in which all the children are using ipads is mute absolute.

Sure, in this vision the teacher is not the orator – the software developer is. Here, it’s all about “personalised learning”, a term with which almost every family entering the education system today will become familiar. It implies a developed intimacy between the students, teachers and curriculum. That teachers will strive

Grolier MIN-MAX teaching machine!” reads a 1961 advertisement, alongside a smiling nuclear family standing around the machine, holding Min-max course boxes like certificates. “Sister is learning Spelling … Father is learning Spanish … Mother is learning Music … Brother is learning Electricity,” it declares. In the time of coronavirus, it’s a familiar mode, as images of sourdough loaves are pasted all over social media. Family is learning to Bake Bread.

In so many ways, this is exactly the kind of person one wants to be in a lockdown – someone privileged enough to make the most of their freed-up time, furthering their education, learning new skills like a good Cub. But with “teaching machines” it is necessary to remember Skinner was neither a teacher nor a professor of pedagogy. Skinner was a behaviourist, an early pioneer of a fascinating branch of psychology that has found itself amplified in the digital world.

“Every app seems to be based around competition, like a gambling gateway,” says Belle, who lives with her partner and their two children in Geelong, Victoria. “We understand that happens in education, but a sticker chart