Opinion EdTech: The Silicone Snake Oil Scam

The Great Educational Snake Oil Emporium: How Silicon Valley Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Problem They Created

There exists in our time a peculiar form of capitalism so brazen in its circularity, so shameless in its logic, that it would make P.T. Barnum blush with professional envy. I speak, of course, of the educational technology industrial complex—that vast, metastasizing organism that has learned to feed upon the very dysfunction it creates, like some pedagogical ouroboros gorging itself on its own tail while demanding applause for its innovation.

Consider the exquisite perfection of the scheme: First, you systematically dismantle centuries of proven educational practice with the zealotry of a digital Cromwell, promising that screens and algorithms will liberate young minds from the tedious burden of human interaction and sustained attention. Then, when the predictable catastrophe unfolds—when children become restless digital zombies unable to sit still for a story, when teachers burn out trying to compete with TikTok for fifteen-second attention spans—you sweep in like a benevolent savior with new solutions, innovative platforms, revolutionary approaches that will surely fix the mess you've made.

It is rather like setting fire to a house and then selling the homeowner increasingly sophisticated fire extinguishers, each one guaranteed to work better than the last, each one mysteriously failing to address the fact that you're still standing there with a box of matches.

The beauty of this racket lies in its self-perpetuating nature. Every failed initiative becomes evidence not of the fundamental bankruptcy of the approach, but of insufficient commitment to digital transformation. Didn't work? You need more devices. Still struggling? Clearly you require additional professional development. Teachers resisting? Time for some "change management" consulting. It's a perfect closed loop of profitable failure.

Meanwhile, the foot soldiers of this revolution—the superintendents and school board members who couldn't sell ice cream to children on a summer day—are treated to sales presentations that would make a timeshare convention blush. These educational leaders, possessed of all the commercial sophistication of a Victorian orphan at a county fair, nod sagely as smooth-talking vendors explain how their latest platform will "leverage synergistic learning modalities to optimize student engagement metrics." The fact that none of these people could define "synergistic learning modalities" if their tenure depended on it is, apparently, beside the point.

What we witness in these boardroom seductions is a masterclass in the exploitation of intellectual insecurity. The administrator who spent their career in education, who might once have understood that learning requires time, attention, and human connection, is made to feel hopelessly antiquated by consultants young enough to be their children, wielding PowerPoints full of buzzwords like weapons of mass distraction. "Data-driven personalized learning ecosystems," they intone, and suddenly everyone feels compelled to nod along lest they appear to be standing athwart the march of progress.

The victims of this elaborate confidence trick are not merely the taxpayers whose money disappears into the Silicon Valley ether, nor even the teachers who find themselves conscripted into serving as tech support for increasingly dysfunctional digital environments. The ultimate casualties are the children themselves—those small humans who arrived at school with the reasonable expectation that adults might teach them something useful, only to discover that their elders are too busy genuflecting before the latest educational app to notice that childhood is disintegrating before their eyes.

These children, possessed of the uncomfortable habit of perceiving reality with crystalline clarity, can see through the elaborate theater of reform with the ruthless precision of tiny anthropologists observing a cargo cult. They understand, with the brutal honesty that only the young possess, that their teachers have been reduced to digital serfs, frantically clicking through compliance dashboards while the actual business of education—the patient cultivation of young minds—withers on the vine.

Is it any wonder that classroom discipline has collapsed? When students witness their teachers transformed into anxious data-entry clerks, when "learning" becomes an endless parade of screen-based activities designed by people who have never spent ten minutes alone with an actual child, when the basic human rhythms of attention and rest are sacrificed to the demands of "engagement analytics"—why should they respect an institution that so obviously disrespects both them and their teachers?

The children's rebellion is not pathological; it is diagnostic. Their restlessness, their refusal to comply with increasingly absurd digital demands, their preference for chaos over the sterile pseudo-learning environments we've constructed for them—these are not symptoms of disorder but of health. They are the immune system of childhood asserting itself against a foreign invasion of commercial interests masquerading as educational innovation.

Yet rather than listen to this vital feedback, we double down on dysfunction. More platforms, more analytics, more "solutions" to problems that exist only because we've forgotten what education actually requires: competent adults who know their subjects, reasonable class sizes, books, paper, pencils, time to think, and the radical notion that children are not customers to be engaged but human beings to be civilized.

The EdTech evangelists will tell you that resistance to their vision represents fear of change, a failure to embrace the future. But perhaps what they mistake for Luddism is simply the stubborn insistence that some things—the patient reading of books, the careful formation of letters, the slow development of sustained attention, the irreplaceable presence of a knowledgeable teacher—cannot be disrupted without being destroyed.

In the end, the greatest irony of our educational moment is that we live in an age of unprecedented access to human knowledge, yet we've somehow convinced ourselves that learning requires the mediation of venture capitalists. We possess libraries that would have made Alexandria weep with envy, yet we're persuaded that education cannot occur without the blessing of algorithm designers who wouldn't recognize Socrates if he debugged their code.

The charlatans will continue their rounds, of course, selling new vintages of digital snake oil to the same credulous administrators, promising that this time, surely, their platform will solve everything. The hedonic treadmill of reform will continue its relentless revolution, grinding up teachers and children in its gears while generating handsome returns for distant shareholders.

But perhaps, in quiet moments between sales pitches, we might remember what education looked like before it became a "sector" to be disrupted—when it was simply the ancient and noble work of helping young people become thoughtful adults. That vision requires no platform, demands no subscription fee, and cannot be optimized, monetized, or scaled. It requires only what we seem to have forgotten how to provide: competent adults willing to do the patient, undramatic work of teaching.

Such a radical notion, in our enlightened age, borders on the subversive.