Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy
by Tim Scott
"The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to 'personalize' and 'adapt' learning for students in public school districts across the United States"
Jesse Irwin, Model View Culture
Jesse Irwin, Model View Culture
The state-finance matrix defined: Influenced by David Harvey's notion of the state-finance nexus, the state-finance matrix is a highly disciplined neoliberal landscape where state power structures and technologies facilitate and protect the activities and interests of finance capitalism over all else. This matrix provides an insulated environment for financialization via securitization, which simply described, is a process where financial institutions bundle together (illiquid) financial assets - primarily loans - and transform them into (liquid) tradable securities that can be expeditiously bought and sold in secondary financial markets. Within this globalized environment, digital securities trading - including “fictitious” trading, hedging and speculating in derivative markets - generates “phantom wealth”; whereby the exchange of capital, money and currency is detached from material or labor value. In the twenty-first century, debt is the new global currency and is a primary source of (intangible) wealth accumulation.
Rebooting the System for a New Age
Writing in Forbes Magazine in 2013, technology entrepreneur Naveen Jain made an assessment of the historical origins of mass public education by pointing out that, “Our education system was developed for an industrial era.” Jain went on to explain that the U.S. education system,
…today uses the mass production style manufacturing process of standardization. This process requires raw material that is grouped together based on a specific criteria. Those raw materials are then moved from one station to another station where an expert makes a small modification given the small amount of time given to complete their task. At the end of the assembly line, these assembled goods are standardized tested to see if they meet certain criteria before they are moved to the next advanced assembly line.
Jain makes this point not as a critique of education serving the interests of capitalism through the application of the scientific management model of production (Taylorism) to schooling. On the contrary, he does so to make a case that current education reform policies are a continuation of the original mission of U.S. public education as an instrument of social control, yet only being modernized to bolster financialized capitalism. As Jain puts it, “Our education system is not broken, it has just become obsolete.” He goes on to explain:
When I think of all the tremendous, seemingly impossible feats made possible by entrepreneurs, I am amazed that more has not been done to reinvent our education system. I want all entrepreneurs to take Schools Matter: Education Technology, Surveillance and America's Authoritarian Democracy:
