So dull, so dehumanizing
The thing that capitalists control is, unsurprisingly, capital. This controls how western societies work: if workers, minorities, or any other oppressed group gain too much power, capitalists use economic levers and controls to put people back in their place.
In this post, Audrey Watters reflects on the pandemic realisation about the need for student-centric education reform, and what has happened since. Which is the opposite of that.
I recently saw someone say (citation needed) that we might view this as the ongoing fallout from the pandemic, when, for a brief period, some workers were able to win some concessions from their employers: the ability to work from home, most notably. There has been an uptick in unionization and in public support for unions in the US too, reversing the past few decades' trends for both. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the response from management has been to fire people, to threaten to fire people, and to threaten to replace people with robots (or in today’s parlance, with chatbots or AI agents).
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Arguably, much of the push for even more technology, even more automation, even more control, even more surveillance in the classroom is a consequence of the pandemic too. Recall the astonished recognition – it was ever-so-brief – that teaching was the most important and most difficult job and that teachers needed to not just be praised but compensated much much much better. And now, that’s been erased — purposefully; and conservatives and technologists and politicians alike feel it necessary to put teachers (read: women) back “in their place.”
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During the pandemic, schools had the opportunity to radically rethink what education might look like – as a workplace for teachers, to be sure, but also as a place of growth and exploration and learning for students. Instead many opted to double-down on the worst aspects of school, to embrace some of the worst sorts of surveillance technologies – test-proctoring software, most egregiously.
There was — again, briefly — widespread revulsion about education technology during the pandemic. So dull, so dehumanizing. And now? Now we’re handing everything over to AI – a complete and total surrender to “the digital” at the expense of “the human,” letting the demands of the technology industry dictate pedagogy and research and assessment rather than respond to the needs of teachers or students or parents or communities.
Source: Second Breakfast
Image: Waldemar