Education

Government wants to teach sex-ed to ten-year-olds. What could go wrong?

Under the guise of advancing the STEM education fraud, DARPA is testing next-gen war software on high school students. This highlights another link between government schools and the military.

"the DARPA-funded educational video games developed at the CGS have a purpose beyond the pretense of teaching elementary school children STEM skills.
Instead, the games developed at CGS have had the primary purpose of using grade-school children as test subjects to develop and improve “adaptive learning” training technology for the military.
It's one node in a network of programs originally created with the intent to build better counterinsurgency simulations for American warfighters operating in countries occupied by US forces. In short, DARPA is militarizing academia."

I would say further militarizing.

"In a small lunch room, Cooper and I discuss CGS’s most famous video game,  Foldit, a protein-folding puzzler that crowdsourced research previously only done by experts, making “citizen researchers” out of every player. One puzzle in the game involved a mystery surrounding the cause of the AIDS virus in rhesus monkeys that had stymied scientists for 15 years. Foldit players solved the mystery in ten days."

This is awesome.

"The  CGS website cites DARPA right on its main page, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and several corporate sponsors. But my curiosity was piqued by a 2011 document from the University of Washington declaring CGS's founding with $15 million dollars—the total of a cool $3 million from the Gates Foundation, and $12 million from DARPA."

This is creepy.

"Captain Russell Shilling has since left DARPA; program managers with the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm typically only stay on between four and six years. In June 2014,  President Obama appointed Shilling as the Executive Director for STEM Initiatives at the Department of Education. "

A stronger connection.

"Once perfected in this manner, Shilling goes on, the technology behind adaptive tutoring could be applied to other fields of training more directly fit for military use. There would be no shortage of test subjects either, because, as the newsletter notes, DARPA has access to the children of military personnel around the world through the  Department of Defense Education Activity, a civilian wing of the Pentagon through which this software can be tested. "

Has access to is a vague term.

"As for why DARPA was even pursuing STEM educational video games for elementary school kids, Ragsdale gave a somewhat surprisingly offhand confirmation of what I had found in the budgets and other documents. “The real inspiration for the program was not STEM,” he said. “We wanted to develop new methods that are game-based to accelerate learning and have something that adapts.""
"It’s not the children’s educational games being developed at the Center For Games Science that is interesting to the military—it's the intelligent tutoring technology. The kids are just unwittingly testing it out for them. "

Other applications.

"In fact, DARPA, originally as part of a separate program than ENGAGE but now also handled by Ragsdale, sought proposals to crowdsource the testing and debugging of software, so that it could be done inexpensively by nonexperts.  The Center for Game Science submitted the best pitch, winning the contract and funding for a project called  Crowd-Sourced Formal Verification.
In the end, the CGS solution was to create video games with visuals representing the underlying mathematics, so that as you played you tested the software for defects.  Verigames, a process for detecting software flaws, was born.
Verigames looks like another portal for kids games, and it doesn’t explain on the site what sort of software you are testing. But as DARPA's original  Crowd-Sourced Formal Verification Proposer’s Day Announcement makes clear, as you play these games you are taking part in debugging military weapons systems software. "

That's creepy too.

Here's the school lunches government serves.

Thankfully homeschooling is skyrocketing, but it needs to be more.