ABSTRACT
The abundant evidence of harmful effects of digital technologies prompts the question how society tolerates damaging applications. This chapter argues the pervasiveness of technocratic thinking, fostered by prevailing educational pedagogy that inculcates technocratic values, shapes knowledges narrowly and cultivates a blind eye to injustices. The spread of technological advance to the US education sector enables ways to scale learning through the new ‘edtech’ industry, which targets large numbers of people in the US and worldwide for profit and replicates societal-wide problems such as the erosion of privacy and predictive profiling. The US private sector capitalized on struggles of traditional postsecondary education and precarious circumstances of a population that lacks time and money required for traditional universities. Scholarship casts edtech as ‘disruptive’ and represents the ‘new’ pedagogy as following new educational technologies. However, historicizing the pedagogy shows that its seeds were sown in the mid- to late 20th century when general problems emerged that presaged the digitalization of longstanding dilemmas. As evident in the strategic data-science industry, which has applications that affect everyone, the pedagogy upstream prepares students for jobs downstream by focusing on skill acquisition, but subjects lack knowledges to critically evaluate their work and its connection to societal problems.
