Education: Ethical Issues

The very highest standards for safety and efficacy have to be imposed on devices for neurological modification and cognitive improvement. For clarity, while neurological modification aims to change brain function directly to address specific deficits, cognitive improvement focuses on enhancing existing mental processes through non-invasive means. Both have valuable roles in education, tailored to the needs and conditions of individual students and specific population groups. Because cognitive capacity, memory, and learning are so fundamental to personal life and social functioning, no degree of risk and harm should be acceptable and it is difficult to reduce it completely. Standards for safety should align with requirements for clinical and consumer devices. However, consumer devices may have lower standards of effectiveness than those found in clinical application.

(a) Known risks. Current safety standards such as IEC 80601-2-26:2019 for EEG, TES, etc. will remain applicable. Higher standards may have to be set as the scale of brain monitoring and modification grows with advances in neurotechnologies. For example, tES techniques like tDCS and CES may require stricter safety protocols to manage potential risks associated with wider use (Fregni et al., 2015) [15]. Combining EEG and fNIRS for real-time brain activity monitoring—a relatively new concept—would require its own set of standards for accuracy and reliability (Li et al., 2022) [16] . Additionally, the development of BCIs highlights the need for comprehensive pre-market evaluations and long-term studies to assess their safety and effectiveness (Zhang et al., 2021) [17]

(b) Minimal invasiveness. Transcranial recording and stimulatory devices at weak intensity levels are currently considered as minimally invasive. Implantations, including meshes and ports for the inner skull surface to rest on the cortical surface, are more invasive and durable, so they accordingly require higher safety and efficacy criteria. Given their invasive nature, these transcranial  devices are unlikely to be adopted in the education market within the near future. Current trends and evidence suggest that educational neurotechnology will continue to focus on non-invasive methods in the near-future to ensure safety and practicality for students (Sattler & Pietralla, 2022) [18]; (Kostick-Quenet et al., 2022) [19]

(c) Reversibility. The ideal of reversibility does not apply to neuroscientific technologies applied for learning, since cognitive improvement and learning retention has to be durable to be desirable. Lasting and even permanent modification to cognitive operations and mental functioning is the point of education. Stable, long lasting changes to cognitive performance in turn requires sensitivity to unwanted side effects, incidental consequences and reversibility, because cortical regions central to our sense of capability, agency, self, and autonomy are unintentionally implicated.

(d) Vulnerable populations. Young adults and children will naturally be targeted users of educational neurotechnology. Given the high potential for cortical neuroplasticity in these age groups, the strictest safety and efficacy standards have to be imposed and enforced. This may include regulatory oversight, with educational institutions working in collaboration with regulatory bodies to ensure neurotechnological tools meet stringent safety and efficacy standards before being implemented in classrooms. Local regulations should also ensure that teachers are adequately trained to use neurotechnology tools and can recognise any signs of adverse effects in students.  Long-term studies looking for unwanted side effects during important phases of brain development will also be advisable. Collectively leading to the development and adherence of ethical guidelines that prioritize the well-being and privacy of the student.

Informed consent for the use of neurotechnological devices that aid in education should be different for adults or young people. The user should always have the ability to decide whether or not to use the device and have the ability to use the device.

In adult populations, neurotechnology for learning may be considered as a largely voluntary matter. However, protections for children and consumer protections should guarantee that users and their legal guardians are fully informed about the genuine capabilities, limitations, and risks before providing their informed consent.

Young people can be vulnerable to parent, teacher, and peer pressures in school settings. The social contexts where devices are introduced must be supervised carefully and regulated if necessary.

Scenario 1: Middle School Addressing Peer Pressure

A middle school in a wealthy area introduces neurotechnological devices in an attempt to improve overall student performance. The school provides detailed information sessions for students and parents, sharing potential benefits and risks of the technology. Despite the voluntary nature of participation, some students feel pressured by high academic expectations and peer comparisons. To address this issue, the school implements a strict policy ensuring that participation is truly voluntary, trains teachers to recognize and mitigate coercion, and sets up an anonymous feedback system for students to report any peer pressure or concerns. The school also establishes a dedicated committee to monitor the program and ensure ethical, responsible, and equitable use of the technology.

These observations are hardly speculative. One of the industry leaders is BrainCo., which emerged from the Harvard Innovation Lab. Already by 2019, reporting on BrainCo.’s ambitions noted how parents are the intended marketing audience:

‘The company is hopeful that the Headband will soon revolutionize the way people in different sectors and occupations understand their mental state and improve work efficiency. BrainCo’s biggest bet, however, is on the education sector. Their inspiration for applying FOCUS Headband to education came from the CEO’s own experience of seeing so many school children in China suffer from long study hours but failing to achieve good grades because they can’t focus properly. Born and raised in China, the CEO knows too well that the Chinese tiger parents would be very willing to invest in their children’s education to help them stay ahead amid fierce competition’  [20]

The use of neurotechnological devices should make a distinction between use to enhance learning in neurotypical populations, or use for treatment of neurological or psychiatric conditions that affect learning.  There is a need to understand the difference between clinical and non-clinical applications of neurotechnology for designers, developers, and users (and their guardians) from a regulatory/legal perspective for educational use. Within education we are not referring to ‘use for treatment’ which falls under the medical part of the framework. The major stakeholders involved in the use of neurotechnological devices in education would include students, parents/legal guardians, educators, school administrators, healthcare professionals, regulatory bodies, and neurotechnology developers. As students will be the primary users in this setting, they must be fully informed about the limitations and capabilities of these devices, while parents/legal guardians would provide informed consent (especially for minors) and also need comprehensive information on the risks and benefits. Educators and school administrators oversee and implement the use of neurotechnology, which should prioritize ethical application and reducing coercion. Healthcare professionals must be consulted and available to differentiate between the clinical and educational needs, ensuring child centered ethical and educationally appropriate use cases beyond the needs of the researcher/developer.

Regulatory bodies must establish and enforce guidelines for the safe and ethical use of neurotechnology in educational settings, while neurotechnology developers are responsible for creating devices with safety, effectiveness, and suitability as top priorities. Unesco’s Ethical issues of neurotechnology 2021 report notes the safeguarding issues within education of privacy, modification, access and availability in relation to equity- “crucial to preserve the future rights of children and adolescents to make autonomous decisions ” [Xx unesco, pg 69]. Additional in recommendation 195 (pg74) calls for the development of improved and more systematic national frameworks for facilitating meaningful Education. Demarcations must be clearly set between the use for learning enhancement and clinical treatment—educational applications should follow guidelines from educational authorities and child welfare organizations, whereas clinical applications should comply with medical regulations (i.e. health authorities such as the FDA or EMA). The conversation in neurotechnologies for education includes many more stakeholders in comparison, but ultimately it is an important conversation to be had. By establishing these distinctions and considerations, we can guide the responsible and effective integration of neurotechnology in educational contexts.

The distribution of neurotechnology in education can be judged against moral principles of equity and justice. However, introducing expensive devices in this educational arena will largely follow familiar patterns, where access by the many lags behind acquisition by the few able to afford them.

Concerns about equity and inclusion will follow the introduction of tES-based learning. Access to this technology, if only determined by the ability to afford the purchase price, will not satisfy ethical and social justice worries about students obtaining fair access. Despite claims advanced about uplifting disadvantaged students [Hidalgo-Muñoz, 2023 [21],  Yue, 2018 [22], the absence of proper policies regarding new technologies may lead to poor academic outcomes and foster educational inequities. Educational disparities among disadvantaged groups would be perpetuated.

Nevertheless, as the reliability and impact of certain devices becomes empirically confirmed and more established, public demand for child-centered availability will grow. Like the roll-out of personal computers in schools during the 1990s and 2000s, school district budgets may be tasked with expanding access, complemented by public programs to subsidize school or parent purchases.

Early adopters, typically affluent and Western, will play a significant role in determining how neurodata is processed by machine learning (ML) algorithms. Since the effectiveness of this technology relies heavily on ML, the training data provided by these early adopters will shape the performance of the models. Consequently, these models might be biased to perform better on data from early adopters, rendering them less effective for other populations, such as non-Western or non-English-speaking groups, who would be considered “out of sample” in terms of the training data.

The authenticity of the use/user of neurotechnological devices applied in education must be respected, so that what the person produces in his or her intellectual exercise is his or her own and respected.

Neurotechnological adjustments to overall mental states and targeted cognitive operations that prove to be conducive for learning will inevitably affect, directly or indirectly, wider capacities for practical and social cognition. Precision targeting of “just the smart part of the brain” or any supposedly functionally modular system is largely considered a fantasy within the scientific community due to the inherent complexities involved. The brain is a unique organ—its neural circuits are highly interconnected (as we observe in neuroplasticity), making it challenging to isolate and enhance just one cognitive function without affecting others [Chen & Hong, 2018 [23]. Thus, setting aside the ethical perspective briefly, there is no guarantee that impacting isolated cognitive functions could be achieved without unintended effects, and no studies suggesting this have been published in peer-review journals to date. A person’s learning patterns remain more holistic than discrete; educational advances are simultaneously developments of the whole person and their own self-conceptions [Lee, 2018 [24].

Issues surrounding self-identity may already emerge at the stage of classifying learners who are more likely to benefit from the adjustments delivered by neurotechnological devices. Neurological interventions will require psychologically-informed justifications, but the paradigm for psychological intervention relies on a medical model, identifying deficiencies and prescribing therapies. Consequently, psychopathology is never far from the discussions. The question, “Why does my child have learning difficulties?” quickly veers into “Where are the problems with my child’s brain?” The transition between learning difficulties and ‘problem’  is no illusion, as parents may not understand how approved devices are moving from laboratories and clinics into their child’s classrooms. The field of education already struggled with outdated notions of “special education,” and stereotypes about learners with cognitive and learning disabilities/differences persist. Educational neuroscience’s lack of preparedness for offering a non-diagnostic paradigm raises the immediate issue of unintentionally fostering exclusivist regimes instead of inclusivist approaches.

Further issues involve how educational neurotechnologies do not automatically transfer from clinical populations to classroom settings. Clinical settings often exclude users based on factors such as neurodiversity and  learning differences, meaning these neurotechnologies may not be suited to the diverse needs of a typical educational setting.

Moreover, the continuous collection of student data, especially at pre-university level, has significant ethical and social implications. As students are monitored over time, the data generated by neurotechnology with the ability to track and store for specific other evaluative purposes pose current future risks that we can not yet imagine. Respecting students’ autonomous choices regarding the use of neurotechnologies is essential. This involves assessing these devices and their value not only in terms of achieving learning goals but also in alignment with broader educational values. Ensuring that students have a say in whether and how these technologies are used is crucial for their effective and ethical implementation.

There is certainly the potential for users of neurotechnological devices in education to be at risk of having their privacy affected, because brain activity can be constantly monitored indirectly, such as measuring their concentration times and potentially knowing what they would be thinking.

Education neurotech has the potential to uniquely violate neuro-privacy due to interaction with minors in a formative period early in their lives, collecting vast amounts of data about neurological functioning and performance.For example: The ability to ‘read out’ mental state (engaged/not-engaged) in real time is perhaps a privacy concern.  A student might not want these details about their state of mind to be available to their educator. Some additional major issues include privacy, data ownership, transfer of personal data to third parties, and vulnerability to surveillance and hacking. Educational neurotechnology raises specific considerations related to the extended duration, diverse pedagogical contexts, and group settings in which neuroelectric data are collected.

Length of Data Collection Period: Collecting data over long periods enables the creation of high-quality individual profiles of brain activity. This is especially pertinent as it allows for second-by-second mapping of an individual’s brain activity to the content of educational lessons. Such detailed profiling helps identify how different content activates the brain, providing insights into which topics stimulate an individual more or less. This can allow constructing comprehensive databases of topics or contents that are interesting or engaging to each individual. However, there are significant ethical concerns with such detailed data collection. Firstly, there is the issue of privacy, as continuous monitoring and recording of brain activity could lead to intrusive and potentially unauthorized surveillance. Additionally, there is the risk of misuse of the data, where sensitive information about an individual’s cognitive and emotional responses could be exploited for commercial or manipulative purposes. There is also the question of consent and whether individuals fully understand and agree to the extent of the monitoring and the potential uses of their data. Finally, the potential for bias in data interpretation and the consequences of such biases on educational and professional opportunities must be considered, as they could reinforce existing inequalities or create new forms of discrimination.

Multiple Pedagogical Contexts: Data collection across various subjects (e.g., math, physics, grammar) helps in understanding how an individual’s brain responds to different types of content. This comprehensive view of neurocognitive function can predict how a person will react to different learning materials in real-world scenarios. This knowledge (data) can potentially  be used (or abused) in various contexts such as when evaluating job candidates or for further study.

Group Setting: The most unique aspect of educational neurotechnology is its application in group settings. It allows for identifying individuals whose brain responses align with or differ significantly from the group. This data can also be used to predict the quality of social relationships between individuals, as synchronized brain activity has been linked to social network dynamics.

Much of that data could easily get uploaded to the user’s own computer, as well as a manufacturer’s data center.  The surveillance and privacy of an individual’s data is paramount in education. Therefore, understanding what happens to the data is crucial. Questions of data ownership, storage, access, use, and, finally, deletion need to be asked before using neurotechnology in any educational settings. Currently, neurotechnologies in education fall into research categories and are not being used by educational settings themselves. Data governance is controlled by the research party.