Once again, it appears that people are glorifying the machine again and exalting it to a dominant position over society and humankind itself. Once again, people put quantity over quality, believing that something as complex and immaterial as human emotion can be quantified into a data set of integers and percentages.

This worship of machine, and the unjustified extension of its jurisdiction into domains it has no place whatsoever meddling with, finds itself expressed again in the recent technological concoction that is the "Facial Action Coding System," created by Dr. Paul Eckman, engineered and realized by Prof. Thomas Huang of the University of Illinois and his colleagues. With this FACS, they believe that one's emotions can be easily identified and laid down on a neat percentage-based chart of X-percent this, Y-percent that. This technology, they believe, can be used in classrooms, as a means of ensuring a student's perpetual engagement in the lesson via improvisation of the lesson based on whatever calculations are made.

However, does one need to make a particular face to be bored, or confused? There are some faces we might make most of the time, possible some of us who make them all the time when losing interest or encountering confusion--however, that may not be so for all of us. There may be those whose faces might say, "I understand the lesson," but their souls say "What in the world is this?" Similarly, their faces might say, "I am intrigued by this," while within their hearts in reality, they are waiting for that relieving ring of the lunch bell to come upon their eardrums.

The human face is not a good indicator for emotion--if one wishes to be somewhat poetic, one could say that the human face is "two-faced;" It could tell you one emotion while hiding and masquerading another. One's face can be stern and mean-looking, while in fact underneath it lies the feeling of great satisfaction or relaxation. One's face can be happy and smiling (a physically genuine smile, too), maybe even laughing, while masquerading behind it, for some conscious or unconscious purpose, is a sorrowful melancholy that could wring tears from a stone.

In contrast to the thought behind this technology's premise, which claims that the human heart's imprints on the face can be "classified [in to] six basic emotions--happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness--and then associated each with characteristic movements of the facial muscles," (D'Alto, Paragraph 3) I claim that human emotion can not be quantified. No one can rely upon the face to know the heart, just like no one can rely upon reason solely to know the Universe and the powers and Power beyond it. This technology should not be used in classrooms, or in fact anywhere really, for due to its erroneous foundation, there are bound to be erroneous results; not mere outliers, but I would say a significant chunk and portion of facial assessments. I am against the "value" of this technology being used to read students' emotions--for I am against this technology being used anywhere, and the false material-minded thinking which is its, and modernity's in general, foundational philosophy.