Is it right for robots to be raising our children to be robots?

• 16 September 2017
• Jane Evans
• no comments

An article in the Telegraph caught my eye on Twitter this week. It reported that a shortage of childcare staff in Japan has seen them begin to use robots! Yep – I did say robots.

Robots designed to look after children are being introduced in Japanese nurseries in an attempt to ease the nation’s acute shortage of childcare staff.

Global Bridge Holdings, a Tokyo-based childcare and nursing start-up, has collaborated with Gunma University academics to develop a new system using robots and sensors to monitor children.

Centre stage is a robot called Vevo, complete with bear-shaped head and humanoid body, which is able to recognise and greet children as well as record their body temperatures using a thermograph.

A robot has no feelings. It cannot respond in a heartfelt way or give off any emotional energy. A child’s body can‘t melt into a robot’s body, or tune into its smell, its heartbeat or breathing rhythm. A robot has no gut instinct about a child’s emotional needs or struggles. As a toy, a robot could be fun. As a carer, it would be a catastrophe for any child’s wellbeing.

Attachment research and neuroscience make it clear that children fare best in all areas, but especially emotionally, with contact and input from caring adults. Pretty bloody obvious really!

Why might the children who are being raised by robots fair better in some of our schools?

I was recently sent an article about a school in Bristol, using ‘Ready to Learn.’ This school behaviour system relies heavily on managing children and their behaviours with the swift use of, sharp punishments. The article reported that this system is proving to be a great success for all. Under Ready to Learn, children HAVE to conform, follow rules and not upset the adults or they will suffer some shaming and demeaning consequences.

Ready to Learn

At its heart, Ready to Learn is an extremely simple, binary system for behaviour management: students are either ready to learn or they are not.

If students aren’t focused in lessons, they receive a warning, with their name written on the board. Students automatically receive a warning for talking over the teacher or another student, or for being off task.

Students who receive a second warning in a single lesson are sent to our isolation room for a full school day (that is, five full lessons including an hour’s detention after-school). This is a massive deterrent, and despite high numbers initially, we have relatively few students in isolation now.

Children need relationships or they get distressed

Top-down behaviour management schemes demand robot-like emotionally devoid compliance. This greatly disturbs me in terms of children’s mental health. After all, children thrive when they are connected with caring adults who offer them experiences of healthy, mutually respectful relationships to help them regulate and understand their feelings.

It seems somewhat ironic then that this TES article on student distress by Sir Tim Brighouse, who is a former schools commissioner for London, also appeared this week.

The number of children in distress is growing – and we don’t have an adequate system in place to support young people’s wellbeing.

On the one hand, children are expected to shut up, sit down and only speak when they are spoken to, or they will be humiliated and isolated. On the other hand, everyone is rightly panicking about children’s mental health needs not being met. Join the dots up, folks!!!!

When robots rule the World it will be pretty dull!

Society and employers, let alone children, do NOT need compliant robots used to submitting to those who have power over them without question. Such dominance creates fear and decreases innovative risk-taking, creative thinking and boundary-pushing which are where breakthroughs often happen. Scared children can’t develop life skills to overcome difficulties if they’ve had to focus on rules, rules, rules and avoiding punishments.

Pupils are still told to walk in single file, track the teacher during lessons and make eye contact whenever speaking to staff, while mobile phones can still be taken for up to six weeks if seen or heard.

Is MIGHT right?

The school in Great Yarmouth currently in the news, and the Michaela Academy, are examples of keeping children scared, controlled and lacking any real voice. None of us would want to experience these conditions in our workplace. We would find it demeaning, stressful and downright miserable.

The school prides itself on its “no excuses” disciplinary approach, with pupils given demerits or detention for forgetting to bring a pencil or pen, for grimacing at teachers or for talking in corridors when moving between lessons.

We should be ashamed that these out-dated practices and beliefs of spare the rod are still a ‘thing’. In 2017 we really do know what children need to be well AND do well. Namely, adults who nurture their natural curiosity, help them explore and manage their feelings in a respectful way and show compassion when they can’t follow the structure and expectations in a school. After all, unlike robots, children are FULL of feelings, curiosity and a joy for life and learning so let’s not scare and control this out of them!