Audrey Watters looks back at the history of Ed Tech’s undermining of public education and, through it, democracy.
For at least the past fifty years*, conservatives have made substantial efforts to dismantle public education, through a variety of policies, practices, and story-lines: budget cuts, vouchers, charter schools, anti-tax measures, anti-union initiatives, “free to choose” and “failing school” narratives. And of course, through education technology initiatives. As much as many people want to insist that ed-tech is the site of progress, even “progressive education, the industry has long served to shift control of education from the public to the private sector, outsourcing the management of infrastructure as well as curriculum, assessment, and teaching itself, hollowing out the expertise within institutions and in turn shifting the mission of many schools — in practice if not in the mission statement itself — to meet the demands of business (or more accurately, the demands of capital) rather than the needs of the communities schools serve.
Despite all the talk that Silicon Valley has “suddenly” taken a rightward turn, its push for education technology has always been part of this ideological endeavor. In the past few decades, tech entrepreneurs and tech investors been some of the loudest voices (with the deepest pockets) pushing education in a certain direction — my god, has anyone ever had as much influence in shaping education policy as Bill Gates?! And no surprise, that direction has been towards classrooms that are more mechanized and more surveilled — full of “personalized” gadgets but increasingly devoid of sociality, humanity, civics.
At the same time as the tech industry has destabilized public education — from within, with its products, and from the outside, through its rhetoric — it has been building and funding a variety of “alternative” educational pathways as well: online, video-based programs focused on technical education (MOOCs and bootcamps), most obviously; micro- and private school programs for younger students; as well as “startup schools” for aspiring entrepreneurs. In all of these, one can see Silicon Valley’s efforts to reshape both the content and the form of education — and I don’t simply mean here lessons about technology delivered via technology. These efforts do involve a Ayn-Randian vision of radical individualism, market power and what Lisa Duggan called “optimistic cruelty,” to be sure. Even in the programs that might seem the farthest from training the next cadre of Y Combinator founders and hustlers — that is, high tech small schools for kindergartners, for example — that “hidden curriculum” remains: what matters are competition, hierarchy, the accumulation of resources, speed, selfishness, and scale. Money, power, and data — not necessarily in that order.