Hack Education

“There must be an industrial revolution in education,” psychologist Sidney Pressey wrote in 1933, “in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education.”

We still hear claims like this today: ed-tech is poised to bring science and efficiency to schools. Teaching machines will individualize instruction, allowing students to move at their own pace through their lessons and freeing teachers from drudgery so she may focus, as Pressey argued, on more important work “developing in her pupils fine enthusiasms, clear thinking, and high ideals.”

“Teaching Machines, is a vital cultural history of our desire for a technical solution to the fundamentally social problem of how to make education work for all families. Watters has written the rare book that is necessary, important, and readable.” -- Tressie McMillan Cottom, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Thick: And Other Essays

“This is a landmark book.” -- John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

Here. I have chronicled for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas. Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. But that’s not my job. (And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.) .

This talk was delivered at OEB 2019 in Berlin. I wanted to call out the misinformation and disinformation repeated by those who get on stage at ed-tech events (as well as those who uncritically accept the fairy tales as truth). If we prance delightedly towards a dystopian ed-tech future, it is in part because of the storytellers in ed-tech who peddle this bullshit.

What is up with all the pigeons? The bird appears across all the various Hack Education projects as it exemplifies how education technology has viewed learning and learners. In part, it's a reference to the work of Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner and their development of multiple choice tests, teaching machines, and behavioral (educational) psychology....