Teachers Vs Tech 2: The Tech / Education bleeding edge (Unedited Draft)

The levels of data regulation across the world has direct and clear parallels with teacher strength and the robustness of Teachers’ Unions in the developing world. These two elements are unconnected in reality but thrive on the same conditions and have begun to bleed together and intertwine. I will make this case as clearly as I can without making links that are not there or coming off as a conspiracy theorist, though it must be noted, these are likely things that few are aware of, let alone concerned about.

Many consider technology and algorithms the final frontier, or the place where humans are most pushing the boundaries of our own existence. Education International’s Angelo Gavrielatos believes that "Education is the last frontier. It is seen as a very lucrative industry which has yet to be fully capitalised”. This idea of being ‘fully capitalised’ is something that large tech companies use in their own language, shifting it to sound more palatable. As an example, the phrase ‘connecting the unconnected’ African citizens without the internet, sounds like a global outreach movement, rather than tycoons mining for their last derrick of oil, or their last group of available customers. In much the same way that human beings are running out, there are only so many students in the world and tech-companies are very keen to have their products thrust forcefully into the hands of young consumers at the most impressionable phases of their lives.

‘Terms of use’ agreements are so closely aligned to the signing of treaties and agreements that parallel neatly with Colonial movements and actions, without sufficient knowledge and awareness to fully give consent to these elements.

The State of Victoria has banned the use of Mobile phones in both Primary and Secondary schools, but some would argue that these strategies don’t go quite far enough.

The Tech space and the Education space are bleeding into one another in the USA, Africa and the Developing world.

“Data Colonialism” or “Digital Colonialism” (Al Jazeera English) as a civilising concept (Ulises Mejias) for ‘our own good’ whilst data is being extracted. The connections between it and traditional, historic, orientalism and colonialism are striking and compelling. The powerlessness of the African groups, with Kenya as the example, unable to protest cry-out or complain, as the forces at play need not even exist within the country, let alone the continent.

Nanjala Nyabola notes that the cheapest available products are those that are spread widely, this has parallels to the idea of the ‘African School of Excellence’s model of ‘affordable’ and relatively teacher free schooling approach. She also notes the fact that these tech companies are able to roll-out such widespread and pervasive ideas and interventions in Africa that they would never be able to ‘get away with’ in their home countries. Whilst this is definitely true in the digital space, where the USA has a highly regulated digital sphere, this is not true for their educational space. For example, in “states, like Arizona, where unions are weak and Republican lawmakers have made decades of cuts to public education” (Kim, 2018) these spaces are ripe for ‘disruption’, to use the language of the technology companies. It is worth noting Selwyn (2016) forcefully challenges us to avoid ‘bullshit’ language in the digital space and in this case, it is disruption of normal human interactions, in the form of teaching and learning interactions.

They outline two major powers in the technology space, US-based companies, such as Google, Facebook, etc. which position themselves as saviours of the developing world. Whereas Chinese-based technology companies, Huawei is used as an example, feel no need to position themselves in this way.

Nanjira Sambuli positions the focus of “Techno-politics” as the rush to connect the unconnected in the developing world.

‘Teachers’ Pay Teachers’ and the ‘Uberfication’ of education as a natural cause of poor conditions for teachings, as a tangential influence, weakness of the union movement in these spaces. As an example, “In Arizona and other states where teachers have recently gone on strike, pay is a central issue: the average American teacher earns five per cent less than he did in 2009.” (Kim, 2018). The continuing downward spiralling of this type of pay and conditions leaves gaps where Silicon Valley and technology ‘big tech’ corporations can find spaces for experimentation.

The ‘flexible staffing’ referred to in part 1 of this blog series allows for the key cost of all schools to be greatly reduced, as Gavrielatos notes, “teachers make up about 70 per cent of a school budget. If you want to make money, you hire fewer teachers or unqualified staff" (Patty, 2019). A more jaundiced eye might note that the second biggest cost in many schools, whether the bill is footed by tech companies or families, is technology. Perhaps it is more than a mere coincidence that tech companies seeking greater penetration of their products (the masculinist language is not lost on me here) are also seeking more flexible ways to remove the primary cost holding them back, the teaching workforce. In the American school context, the labour conditions that exist, pushing teachers out of the middle class as a result of their deteriorating conditions is solving this problem for tech companies and allowing them space to operate.

A well-publicised failure of this type of technology-fuelled, erroneously dubbed ‘personalised’ or ‘blended’ learning is ‘Alt School’. The $200 million-dollar failure of ‘Alt School’, left the former google employee founder, stating that:

“People often ask what I wish I’d known before starting AltSchool and I say: However difficult you think working in education is...multiply that by 10. Life at a startup is hard, but education is exponentially harder.” (Watson, 2019)

This failure left many students without schools, with parents raising outcry that their students had been little more than software testers and guinea pigs for the groups ideas of how to ‘revolutionise’ education. These comments loop back well to former Templestowe College Principal Peter Hutton who famously said ‘kids aren’t widgets’ in his very human and student-centric quest to re-tool schools around this core concept (McGowan, 2018). It is worth perhaps consider these students, who though not widgets, were treated in this manner and exposed to an untrialled and largely unsuccessful form of education at the whims of billionaire tech investors preferences.

This catastrophic failure of a heavily subsidised initiative with all of the write big ed-tech companies involved would seem to be a movement away from tech-heavy and tech-centric ideas. Trends in this space come and go, but there has been some murmuring of the fact that certain Silicon Valley employees of large tech companies are sending their own children to schools with low, or no-tech.

Running Word Count: 27,644

Originally Published: Nowhere!