A primary school in China is now dealing with serious backlash for using technology that seems like it came straight out of a Black Mirror episode.Following negative reactions from the public, officials have ordered the Xiaoshun Central Primary School in the city of Jinhua, Zhejiang province to stop making their students wear brainwave-detecting headgear, Sixth Tone reported on Friday.BrainCo., a cognitive technology company, developed the gadget called FocusEDU to improve the classroom environment through “real-time student engagement feedback.” When worn during class, it can monitor students' attentiveness and send relevant data to parents.Photos and videos of students wearing the headgear quickly circulated online on Weibo, where users concerned about the students’ privacy condemned the school’s use of the gadget. But school officials said that students “willingly” used the devices with their parents’ consent.The school started using the device in September after an alumnus, who is an investor in BrainCo., donated units to the school.BrainCo. told reporters that the devices weren’t just monitoring students’ attentiveness but also “training and improving students’ concentration” through exercises including meditation and “neural feedback” games.“Students don’t have to wear it every day. Instead, they train with it once or twice per week, with each session lasting a maximum of half an hour,” a BrainCo spokesperson told reporters.“During lessons, teachers can only see the average concentration levels of the class and not the data of individual students, and this serves as feedback on how well the class is absorbing the content.”Zhang Yiwei, one of the teachers in Xiaoshun Central Primary School, told The Wall Street Journal that students who wore the headgear were “louder than usual” when answering questions. The school also said that the headbands had “successfully improved efficiency during lessons and improved students’ concentration.”Despite praise from the educators, the device has gotten mixed reviews from students.“When we first wore the headbands, it felt like they were controlling us,” one student told the The Wall Street Journal.While some said the devices helped them achieve “near-perfect scores,” others complained that they were distracting and uncomfortable.Find Lia on Instagram and Twitter.
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