Digital Technology, Social Justice and the Commodification of Education

In the last decades schools (and schools’ reforms) have been increasingly linked to a set of neoliberal ideas that are creating huge profit opportunities for edu-business, ultimately redefining the educational experience and what it means to teach and to learn today. Techno-giants (backed up by neo-liberal reforms) have contributed to redefining the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that made them predominant in digital capitalism. They are influencing the subjects taught, the classroom tools used and fundamental approaches to learning. This entails a singular experiment in education, with millions of students, teachers and parents basically serving as beta testers (or unpaid “digital laborers”) for their ideas and products. Profit opportunities for edu-business occur both at an infrastructural level in a shift from state to private provision (commodifying education), and at more cultural level with school's reforms and initiatives somehow related to digitalization and datafication (assessment, data analytics, big data and personalized learning, etc.). Unsurprisingly, the combined effect of corporate investments (especially during the Covid pandemic) and neoliberal processes of reform is the growth of a retail consumer base for hardware, software and online services curbing education policy towards ed-tech “solutions” which generate tons of big data and wholesale sales opportunities. Although we might debate whether these developments are inherently wrong (or especially new), more important questions need to be asked about regulation and oversight of corporate activities in schools. For example, how should public intervention oversight corporate activities in schools? Should techno-giants continue to offer their “free” services and tools to schools? How could we make them respond primarily to the ideals of public education rather than working to collect data on young Internet users and create demand for their products? Shouldn't we adopt non-corporate alternatives? How do teachers perceive these developments?