The Slate researchΒΆ

A school frontage of grey stone at golden hour, with a long queue of pupils filing in at a side door. Above the door, one gilded word: DINNERS. Beside the door at waist height a worn brass plate is being levered off its mounting by a workman, its centre polished pale by seven years of thumbs; on the frame above it a new lens sits in a fresh brass housing, already wired and already watching the queue. Pinned to the railings a notice curls in the sun with its tear-off slip still attached, the small print too fine to read, and the slips of a dozen identical notices lie uncollected in the gutter below it. The pupils in the queue are fifteen and sixteen and are talking to each other. A watchman stands across the street writing in a notebook, facing the road.

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU)

The refectory at a city school takes payment without coin. For seven years it did that by thumb: a pupil pressed a thumb to a brass plate and the meal was charged to an account. This year the plate came out and a device that recognises faces went in. The queue moves faster and nobody has to remember anything.

Parents were told when the thumbprints started, seven years ago, and every family since has been told the same way at enrolment: a note with a slip to return if they would rather their child did not take part. Most slips do not come back. The school has read that silence as agreement ever since, and reads the same note as covering the face as well as the thumb.

The school is concealing nothing. It will describe the whole arrangement to anyone who writes in, it believes the arrangement is lawful, and until the MCLU asked, nobody had suggested otherwise.

Most of the pupils are old enough to decide this for themselves. None of them was asked, then or now. Nobody assessed what the change from thumbs to faces might cost before the change was made, because the thumbs had been uneventful for seven years and this was understood to be the same thing, only quicker.

  • Does a note sent home seven years ago, answered by silence, and concerning a thumb, reach as far as a face?

  • The people it is about were never the people asked. Who was entitled to decide, and what follows from the fact that nobody put the question to them?

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Last updated: 17 September 2026