(For a project, formerly known as "Speaking Openly")

I often quote the Marxist Antonio Gramsci – “I am a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of will.” I quote Gramsci because, as “ed-tech’s Cassandra,” I’m often accused of being too critical, too negative about the future of education. And admittedly, I do fear that the future might be grim. But I am an optimist. I think that most of us that work in and near education are – we have to be. We believe in the transformative potential of teaching and learning. We believe in shaping and changing minds; as such, we believe in shaping and changing the future. The three other respondents have all laid out fairly optimistic visions of the future of teaching and learning – deliberately so, no doubt – a future that honors individuals, empathy, cultural relevance, social change, and social justice. And if that future is technologically-enhanced, it’s enhanced in such a way to make it more human and humane and less machine-like.

These are all reflections of our pedagogical goals, I think, as progressive educators. But these are also political goals. And I want to pause here to talk a little bit more about what I see as the future of the politics of education and, perhaps just as importantly, the future of the politics of the digital technology industry. A possible future, I should be clear, if we do not tackle these questions politically.

I think the others were right to point out that “learning” is distinct from “education.” But I think we have to talk about “education,” the institution. We have to scrutinize their role in past injustices, their role in inscribing and re-inscribing hierarchies, and we have to demand better. But I’m not sure we can abandon institutions, particularly public institutions, entirely. I say this recognizing that among the many crises we face right now, a lot of these involve our loss of faith in institutions – in the government, in the Church, in markets, in medicine, in science, in schools. How do we rebuild so that the collective and the communal is protected and that, as I fear would happen without institutions, it’s up to the individual and her or his privilege and social capital alone, in order to survive and succeed.

When I talk about the digital technology industry, I use the shorthand “Silicon Valley.” It’s not quite an accurate term geographically, but I use it to refer to its ideology – one of radical individualism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, exploitative and unchecked capitalism. This ideology isn’t espoused only by those who work and invest in Silicon Valley, of course. But increasingly – because of the financial and political power and influence of Silicon Valley – this ideology is becoming quite dominant.

We must ask how this will affect education. Disinvestment? The shrinking of the public sector? A move away from the communal to the individual? “Personalization” – one of the buzzwords of education technology? Standardization? Outsourcing? Uber-ification? Dismantling of labor protections? Automation? Algorithms? Financialization and monetization of all aspects of our lives? Surveillance, not only by the state but by corporations?

2015 was a record-setting year for education technology investment. Over $6 billion by some estimates. What was popular among investors? Test prep. Tutoring. Private student loans. Learning management systems. Online “skills training.”

Now to be fair, that $6 billion is dwarfed by venture capital that goes into other sub-sectors of tech. And Uber alone raised about $5 billion last year. But this flood of money comes with political power. It comes with a power to reshape – or to try to reshape – all sorts of narratives about what it means to be social, political, workers, students, “users,” citizens. The narratives that Silicon Valley tells about education are that schools are broken, that they are irrelevant, that they are inefficient, that unionized labor prevents innovation, that education can be automated. Successful entrepreneurs do not just form companies or form investment firms; they start philanthropies, like the Gates Foundation and now the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. These organizations have an oversized influence on education policy. They envision a future of teaching and learning that is, to borrow from Liz’s formulation, very much about calculation – about data and algorithms and efficiencies and tracking and analytics. They are profoundly anti-democratic.

This is one of the challenges we face, I think, particularly when we talk about a future of teaching and learning and digital technologies: this question of democracy and open communication and collaboration built on technologies of surveillance and command and control, built on top of pre-existing communication networks, never quite erasing the previous manifestations of power or politics, despite our rather utopian hopes that technologies like the Web just might.

Investor Marc Andreessen famously said a few years ago that “software is eating the world.” Andreessen is an important figure to think about in terms of technology and education – and not simply because his investment portfolio includes companies like the MOOC startup (or once upon a time a MOOC startup) Udacity. Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign where he worked on the Mosaic Browser, the first browser for the Web. He believed that the browser had commercial possibilities and built Netscape Navigator – which shared no code with the browser built by a public university but shared its functionality. Andreessen became a billionaire with Netscape, a company’s whose IPO is generally seen as synonymous with the Internet bubble and with young tech entrepreneurs who would reshape the world. “Software is eating the world.” It’s eating public education, it’s eating higher education, arguably, despite the origins of almost all the innovations of the past sixty years in the computer industry being intimately tied up with these scholarly institutions.

To echo Maha’s question about whose learning – learning by whom and for whom in what contexts, I would add a litany of questions about the world that software is purportedly eating – whose software, who benefits, whose world is being re-enacted and recoded and digitized? A world of the global elite? A world of the global north? A world of engineers? A world of white men? A world of machines?

What about the rest of us? Non machines and non humans alike?

The future of teaching and learning will continue to be, as the history of teaching and learning would show us, political acts, political practices. They must be ones of resistance, I think, to the stories and the practices of exploitation. As we think about institutions – new ones and old ones – we must demand justice. We must cultivate “response- ability” – I’m using this term as Donna Haraway does – to be able to respond, to be able to recognize our complicity in harmful acts past and present, and to think about transformation that is deeply critical and deeply empathetic to all the world around us. This is a political undertaking, and an incredibly urgent one. It isn’t because, as Andreessen gleefully pronounces, because “software is eating the world.” It is because the world is dying or careening at least to another global extinction event. Addressing this isn’t simply a question of engineering. It is a question of compassion and teaching and learning and radical pedagogy. We must be optimists, not pessimists as hard as it can be in the face of global crises. Our world, our survival demands it.