SCHOOLING FOR SILICON VALLEY
About the Book
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 counter-narratives 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 such, the larger question this book explores is: Why should we trust the tech industry—or more specifically—the tech billionaires who are increasingly governing all aspects of our lives?
About the Author
Timothy Scott is a social work professor, critical scholar and engaged educator who has a doctorate in social justice education from University of Massachusetts Amherst with an emphasis in political economy, ethnic studies, and education policy. He is a long-time labor and community organizer within regional, national and international social justice projects and liberation movements.
What Readers Are Saying
"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 anti-democratic origins and dystopian futures of a wide range of technologies with breathtaking depth and breadth. Schooling for Silicon Valley is brilliant, eye-opening, 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, and former Dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco.
"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.
"In scorching and lucid detail, Tim Scott tracks our current struggles to disrupt and revamp public education today. In the face of EdTech's promises for personalized, engaging education delivered by Generative AI, Scott shows how the new educational system shares the same aims as the old with disturbing additions: social control over the population of young people with newly invasive surveillance systems and more concentrated profit-making proprietary technologies to automate teaching. At the heart of this book is a vision of technocratic capitalism that guts the working class of meaningful, socially useful employment. Importantly, for our town halls, school boards, student government, teachers unions and all who care about learning, Scott sharpens the fight for a public education that serves the public not the ruling classes. "
Elisabeth B. Armstrong
Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, and author of Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949.