I’m in Comment on ed tech
This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.” Here’s how it opens:
Audrey Watters is a prophet. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers, however. The main business of prophets, even in the Bible, isn’t the future. It’s the present. Better to say: it’s the set of possible futures that are liable to follow from crucial choices made in the present. Israel’s prophets brought a word from God to the people of God, and that word was—as it always is for prophets, including Jesus—repent. To repent means to turn, to veer right rather than left, to take this branch on the decision tree, not that one, to see the fork in the road for what it is: an opportunity, probably the last, to avoid disaster. Because disaster is what awaits if you continue on the current path.
True, Watters is a secular prophet. She doesn’t speak on God’s behalf or for the sake of a chosen people. But like Amos, she brings a word of judgment to the powers that be. Those powers she calls Ed Tech. And like the nations against which Amos railed, Ed Tech is a bastion of avarice and injustice. It grinds the faces of the poor into the dust.
Ed Tech is short for education technology. Think Zoom, “learning management systems,” online anti-cheating software. At first glance those might seem harmless enough. Allow Watters to dissuade you. She has a decade’s worth of work with which to do so. Sometimes it seems she has the beat all to herself, a one-woman journalistic gadfly buzzing around the behemoths and motherships of Silicon Valley. Unswattable, she maintains a blog, Hack Education, and has self-published several collections of talks and essays. In August MIT Press published her latest book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, which she wrote as part of a fellowship at Columbia University.
Click here to read the rest. Let me add for the record that editor Brian Dijkema is a mensch. He’s edited me three times now for Comment and every time both the substance of the piece and its style is vastly improved. (“Plain English, Brad, plain English!”) Also, if you read the whole thing you’ll have the pleasure of stumbling upon a sentence that contains “some kind of Burkean phlegm,” which I trust is a phrase I’m the first to have used. I certainly enjoyed writing it.
