We don't like experts or elites:
We prefer a 'level playing field':
But this leads to lots of testing and measuring:
In the classroom we have lots of metrics and measuring:
And 'smart targets':
In China we have 'social credits':
BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed looks at these issues:
Metrics
Laurie Taylor explores the increasing use of metrics across diverse
aspects of our lives.
From education to healthcare, charities to policing, we are are
target-driven society which places a heavy emphasis on measuring,
arguably at times at the expense of individual professional expertise.
Laurie is joined by Jerry Muller, Professor of History at the Catholic
University of America in Washington, D.C., who asserts in his book, The
Tyranny of Metrics, that we are fixated by metrics, to the extent to
which we risk compromising the quality of our lives and most important
institutions.
He is also joined by Btihaj Ajana, Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, who, in the
introduction to the book, Metric Culture - Ontologies of Self-Tracking
Practices, explains the concept of the 'Quantified Self Movement' -
whose philosophy is 'self-knowledge through numbers'.
With such a plethora of personal information about ourselves being
generated daily are we complicit in creating a culture of surveillance
with the blurring of boundaries between the private and public?
Stefan
Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the
University of Cambridge, joins the discussion. Revised repeat.
See also:
And:
And:
And:
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