Schooling for Silicon Valley

A growing body of evidence reveals how EdTech is a vital apparatus of Big Tech’s ubiquitous web of surveillance and control bound to larger political, economic and cultural forces. Tech companies design platforms that inflict a range of emotional, cognitive, physical and developmental harms on children, and replace human relationships with technologies that cannot provide the authentic emotional and empathetic experiences that are essential for healthy development and well-being. GenAI is fast becoming crucial infrastructure for education systems, despite its record for augmenting bigotry, generating false information and enabling cheating. Ultimately, EdTech prioritizes obedience and subverts critical literacy. This book meticulously applies critical and cultural theory to analyze the discourse of industry narratives alongside counternarratives and hard evidence that expose EdTech’s role as a compulsory appendage of the exploitive and autocratic designs of the Big Data and AI ecosystem. “As schools around the world hurtle towards wholesale embrace of more and more forms of EdTech, Timothy Scott flashes big bright red stoplights by not only debunking deceptive marketing but also illuminating the profoundly antidemocratic origins and dystopian futures of a wide range of technologies with breathtaking depth and breadth. Schooling for Silicon Valley is brilliant, eyeopening, compelling, and a must-read for anyone concerned about education, especially now.” —Kevin Kumashiro, Author of Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education “This provocative and timely volume offers an exceedingly well researched expose of the ways that technology companies are warping teaching and learning. As corporations falsely assert that tech can replace teachers and algorithms can replace meaningful curriculum, this book gives us our talking points for resisting tech giants and their government allies.” —Celia Oyler, Professor Emerita of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University