Educational technology hype: Edtech FOMO marketing

 The Education FOMO HypeMachine: A Wake-Up Call for Education

A TED Talk in the Style of Christopher Hitchens

Food for Thought - Discussion Starters

For Educators:

• "When was the last time you saw a vendor presentation that included failure rates or negative outcomes?"
• "How many 'revolutionary' platforms have you implemented in the past five years? How many are still in use?"
• "What would happen if you invested edtech budgets in smaller class sizes or teacher professional development instead?"

For Administrators:

• "Are you buying technology to solve educational problems, or are you buying solutions to vendor-created problems?"
• "What percentage of your technology budget goes to annual licenses versus one-time purchases? What does that tell you?"
• "How do you measure the opportunity cost of technology investments versus traditional educational resources?"

For Policymakers:

• "Should educational technology be subject to the same evidence standards as medical interventions?"
• "What would happen if edtech companies had to provide warranties on their learning outcome claims?"
• "How can we protect schools from predatory marketing while still encouraging genuine innovation?"

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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen—educators, administrators, and survivors of two decades of relentless educational hype.

Permit me to begin with a simple, perhaps uncomfortable, assertion: you have been systematically deceived. Not once, not twice, but with the regularity and predictability of a metronome, by a parade of ed tech evangelists, publishers, and consultants who have discovered that your noble desire to serve children can be weaponized into profit.

The Anatomy of Educational Snake Oil

Let us dissect this phenomenon with the precision it deserves. The Fear of Missing Out is not merely a marketing tactic in education—it is the entire business model. The pitch is always the same, delivered with evangelical fervor:

• "This platform will revolutionize your classrooms."
• "This AI will personalize learning for every child."
• "This dashboard will finally give you the data you need."

And the unspoken threat lurking beneath every glossy presentation? If you do not buy in—if you dare to ask for evidence, if you have the temerity to suggest that perhaps we should evaluate before we purchase—you are failing your students, betraying your teachers, and condemning your community to educational obsolescence.

This, my friends, is intellectual blackmail dressed up as innovation.

The Inconvenient Truth About Evidence

Let us turn, as we must, to that most inconvenient of things: actual data. A 2023 RAND Corporation study found that fewer than 30% of school leaders could identify measurable improvements in student outcomes from their ed tech investments. Meanwhile, the global ed tech market has ballooned to over $340 billion—a figure that would make arms dealers weep with envy.

A comprehensive meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research revealed that technology interventions, on average, produce effect sizes of 0.15—what researchers politely call "small" but which we might more accurately describe as "negligible." To put this in perspective: a caring teacher who knows her students' names produces larger learning gains than most ed tech platforms.

Consider this delicious irony: we have spent more money on educational technology in the past decade than most nations spend on their entire military budgets, yet reading and math scores have remained stubbornly flat. If this were a pharmaceutical trial, the FDA would have shut it down years ago.

The Cycle of Manufactured Urgency

Why does this cycle persist with such nauseating regularity? Because fear is the most renewable resource in education. Every autumn brings fresh anxiety: new standards, new assessments, new pressures. And into this anxiety steps the ed tech industry, offering not solutions but salvation.

The script never changes:

• Create urgency through manufactured crisis
• Present technology as the inevitable solution
• Offer limited-time deals to bypass rational evaluation
• Promise results that are always just one more purchase away

It is the same playbook used by televangelists, multilevel marketing schemes, and miracle diet peddlers. The only difference is that our snake oil salesmen wear suits and speak at conferences with names like "Transforming Education Through Innovation."

The Human Cost

Let us not forget the collateral damage of this relentless hype cycle. Teachers—those professionals you claim to champion—are left to implement half-baked solutions with training that consists of a thirty-minute webinar and a prayer. They become unwilling beta testers for products that were never designed with actual classroom realities in mind.

Students, meanwhile, become guinea pigs in an endless parade of pilot programs. One year it's flipped classrooms, the next it's gamification, then personalized learning platforms, now AI tutors. These children experience more educational whiplash than a crash test dummy.

The result? Teacher burnout at record levels, student disengagement that correlates with screen time, and a growing sense that no one—absolutely no one—is listening to the people who matter most: the humans in the classroom.

The Coming AI Apocalypse

Now we stand at the precipice of the next great hype cycle: artificial intelligence. The promises are grander, the rhetoric more breathless, the potential for disaster more profound. We are told that AI will:

• Replace human tutors
• Eliminate the need for curriculum design
• Predict student success with algorithmic precision
• Finally, finally, personalize learning at scale

But let me ask you this: if we cannot implement a simple learning management system without months of technical difficulties, what makes you think we can successfully deploy artificial general intelligence in classrooms?

If we have learned anything from the past twenty years, it should be this: the more revolutionary the promise, the more skeptical we should be.

The Price of Gullibility

Here is what your credulity has cost us:

Financially: American schools have spent over $60 billion on ed tech in the past decade, often by cutting funding for libraries, arts programs, and counseling services.

Pedagogically: We have created a generation of teachers who spend more time managing technology than teaching children, and students who mistake clicking through modules for actual learning.

Intellectually: We have abandoned the patient, difficult work of education for the seductive promise of technological shortcuts.

A Modest Proposal for Sanity

What is to be done? I propose we embrace a radical concept: intellectual honesty.

First: Demand rigorous, independent evaluation before adopting any new technology. Not testimonials from pilot programs, not case studies funded by vendors, but actual peer-reviewed research comparing outcomes to control groups.

Second: Listen to teachers and students—not just vendors. They are the ones who will live with your purchasing decisions long after the sales representatives have moved on to their next quarterly targets.

Third: Invest in professional development, not just products. A well-trained teacher with chalk and a blackboard will outperform a poorly supported teacher with a million-dollar tech stack.

Fourth: Resist the tyranny of FOMO. True innovation is measured, not manic. The best educational practices are often the oldest ones, refined through centuries of human experience.

The Choice Before Us

We stand at a crossroads. We can continue down the path of perpetual innovation anxiety, always chasing the next shiny object, always one purchase away from educational nirvana. Or we can choose the harder path: the patient, unglamorous work of actual teaching and learning.

There is no silver bullet. There is no algorithmic savior. There is no app that will replace the irreplaceable human connection between teacher and student.

But there is hope—if we have the courage to resist the FOMO machine, to demand evidence over enthusiasm, to remember that education is fundamentally about human beings helping other human beings learn to think.

If we do not wise up—if we continue to mistake marketing for innovation, hype for hope—we will find ourselves not at the forefront of progress, but at the mercy of those who profit from our perpetual anxiety.

The choice is ours. Choose wisely.

Thank you.

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Sources:

• RAND Corporation, "Educational Technology Use and Impact in U.S. Schools," 2023
• Tamim, R. et al., "What Forty Years of Research Says About the Impact of Technology on Learning," Review of Educational Research, 2020
• EdWeek Research Center, "Technology in Schools: Survey Data," 2024
• HolonIQ, "Global EdTech Market Analysis," 2025