While the idea of using a Facial Action Coding System in the educational process would certainly be interesting, I do not think it is nearly advanced enough to be able to be used in modern schools. While the technology may be able to find the hidden emotions behind the famous portrait Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, that does not mean it is in a position to help students learn. Simply put, the Facial Action Coding System does not have the viability, efficacy, or privacy needed in order to supplement learning.

Even if we allowed camera's to scan the faces of students in school, we would not be able to decode their emotions in a speed befiting our educational system today. At the seventh passage, the author states that, "Your home PC can't handle the complex algorithms used to decode Mona Lisa's smile," suggesting that the majority of modern computers do not have the power to actually run the software. The PCs that schools buy are almost never more powerful than the ones bought by consumers for household use, and would thus also not be able to process the data, making the technology rather useless in an educational setting. Even if a school had the funds to buy a computer that could process the data quickly enough to be useful, there are simply too many students for that one computer to process, which would make the entire system useless.

If we were to simply put that first fact aside and instead look at the ability for this technology to assist students in an ideal setting, we still find that students can fake their emotions in order to cheat the system. In the third passage of the artice, the author states, "Eckman has classified six basic emotions-happiness ... and then associated each with charactersitic movements of the facial muscles," meaning that the software associated voluntary or involuntary movements of the face with emotions. The problem with this system is that students can change the look of their face quite easily, and can thus convince the computer to produce desired results, making the system disfunctional. There are quite a few reasons children, especially young ones, would want to make the software not work, including tricking the computer into moving from the original learning program into a more desired one and them simply wanting to see the program fail through their abilities.

The idea of being able to find out the emotions of all of the chidlren in a school on a whim also rises privacy concerns that would need to be addressed before any program including this software would be implemented. The information gathered from students could be used for selfish purposes, as explained in the sixth passage of the article, "if you smile when a Web ad appears on your screen, a similar ad might follow. But if you frown, the next ad will be different," showing that companies have use for this technology to better their businesses. If ad companies managed to get this emotional information from students all across the country, either from the government itself or through illegal actions, they could use that information to make new products and ads that would try to exploit the emotions of children. Because of this and the added concern of giving the information to the government itself, many parents would oppose a system that tracks and records the emotions of children.

Because of the lack of availablity, the potential cheating of the software, and the privacy concerns involved, the Facial Action Coding System is not able to be used in its current state to benefit schools. While this technology could be used in the future to help students, for example students with mental disabilities, it is not able to do so as it is now. It will be interesting to see what this and similar technologies grow to be, for better or for worse.