The Modern Teacher: Reviving Humanistic Learning in the Age of EdTech Control.

In the political economy of U.S. schooling, so-called “standardized” tests are not neutral yardsticks. By design and in practice they embed cultural-linguistic hurdles and reproduce concentrated social advantage. In today’s capitalist, bourgeois school system, these regimes are policy instruments that sort, exclude, and legitimize austerity and privatization, useful to monopoly capital’s project of attacking public education (Hursh, 2013; Saltman, 2014). Bias is not a slur; i

If only my geometry teacher had realized I was a “kinesthetic learner,” I might have understood right triangles while doing cartwheels across the classroom.

Education Colleges such as American College of Education are increasingly enamored with digitization schemes. One example is flippantly referred to as “Bring Your Own Device,” or BYOD, the increasingly common practice of allowing, or expecting, students to use their own phones, tablets, or laptops for schoolwork. It is presented as modern, flexible, student-centered, and cost-effective. Students already have devices, the argument goes, so why not use them? BYOD is not a ped

The presence of digital technology in teaching and learning cannot and does not in itself make instruction more meaningful, equitable, or intellectually productive. Setting aside for the moment the mass surveillance and data mining of our youth, other consequences of educational technologies in action include fragmented learning, obscuring the processes that produce answers, shifting instructional responsibility away from teachers, and arbitrary ‘digitization’ of conventional

The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) has long been celebrated as one of Chicago’s great civic treasures. But behind its sleek glass exhibits and corporate “innovation” rhetoric lies a story of creeping privatization, ideological capture, and attacks on public education under the banner of partnership. Nowhere is this clearer than in the museum’s partnership with Collins Academy STEAM High School in North Lawndale. Through its Science Leadership Initiative (SLI), MSI prese