Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.
He begins:
Oh my God. Oh my effing God.
If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.
I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.
The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?
Learning is earning.
Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”
He writes:
Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?
And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?
And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?
This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.
In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.
So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.
This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”
It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I saw this video the other day and was similarly disgusted. Sat down to write about it and was too sick to my stomach to do so–thankful that Peter took the time to expose this terrifying riff on the education of the future. What a dystopian nightmare.
“U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (at right), a Wisconsin Republican in a tough re-election battle against Democrat Russ Feingold, used an appearance on Thursday to say the “higher education cartel” is raising prices and preventing reforms that would help college students learn at affordable prices.
He criticized accreditors and tenured professors for blocking reforms. He said that he favored “certification,” in which people could demonstrate competency or skills in certain areas through testing rather than earning degrees. (The University of Wisconsin is a leader in competency-based education, in which students earn degrees sometimes in ways similar to the path Johnson suggested.)”
Cheap edu for the lower and middle classes. The privileged few will get the limited slots with human teachers. They’ll keep all the selective schools and a couple of flagship public universities- everyone else will get screens and testing.
I wonder if the higher ed contingent who were so eager to bash K-12 public schools and join the chorus to privatize will be surprised when they’re the new targets.
Frankly, anyone who didn’t see that “tenured professors” were the next designated demons is a dope.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/gop-senator-save-money-replacing-instructors-ken-burns-videos?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c87d37d0e6-DNU20160822&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c87d37d0e6-197462609&mc_cid=c87d37d0e6&mc_eid=1551f5de76
“Reform” is a movement by a bunch of amateur billionaires that are trying to force schools to adopt antiquated behaviorist learning methods on our schools. This narrow view of learning suits the economic purposes of the billionaire class and lends itself to cheaper computer instruction. Authentic teachers understand that there are many different types of intelligence and talents, and a comprehensive education serves our students better. Students learn more by being given the opportunity to explore, think critically and respond in a variety of ways that are more divergent and valid than bubble tests.
The echo chamber is tweeting this piece on remedial courses in college as if it proves that public schools are failing, but they can’t have read it.
What it actually says is that the testing that SLOTS students into remedial courses in college is turning out to be flawed.
Please notify the Obama Administration and the US Dept of Ed!
Maybe they shouldn’t have swallowed testing whole. Maybe they should occasionally venture outside the echo chamber and examine some of these assumptions they based this whole thing on.
“Part of the problem is the standardized tests used to place students in developmental education. Studies show up to a third of students assigned to developmental classes based on placement test scores could have gone straight to a college class and earned a grade of B or better.”
They’re putting too many students into remedial classes based on these stupid tests.
Why didn’t anyone question THE TEST? Why did they all rush to blame K-12 schools? Because it was politically beneficial to ed reform to blame K- 12 schools?
If the testing that slots students into remedial ed is bogus 1/3 of the time, how many students were put into remedial classes based on flawed tests? How much did this slavish adherence to these tests cost students?
http://www.apmreports.org/story/2016/08/18/remedial-education-trap
Now there’s a subject worth a whole discussion. Maybe we had one and I missed it.
“Learning is earning” slogan was a part of John Oliver’s piece last night on charter schools:
Adding to Chiara’s comment about higher ed,- a recent New York Times article, by Javier Hernandez, is titled, “Student Critical Thinking Strong, until College”. If you guessed the study cited, was funded by a venture capitalist and it was concocted by Stanford, you’d be right.
The researchers (who weren’t identified), took all of the US privatizing bunk, massaged it and, pasted it onto China’s university system. So, we see the usual hackneyed reform blather, “student lack of motivation”, “poor quality teachers”, “lax standards”, “professors don’t know how to attract the attention of students”, “classrooms are chaotic” and “universities mired in bureaucracy”. We’re told that “creativity and innovation aren’t killed” by the rote Chinese educational system. It’s the universities that are killing it. Readers of the article can apply critical thinking skills and, focus on Stanford researchers for illustration. It appears they are limited to the parroting of hackneyed opinions from Silicon Valley opportunists.
Regarding Edublocks:
You are being watched. You are being recorded.
You are being calculated and measured and matched to tasks generated by profitable organizations owned by the 1%. But whether they grow their sales or not, they will always walk away with some kind of profit in their pockets while you walk away with your intellect and dignity emptied and dried out.
You are being socially and cognitively programmed and engineered, and you will never break out of your limited cell of poor earning capacity.
You are being studied like a specimen so that you can be placed into the right niche by those who wish to control you and extract the most profit out of you without giving you too much back in return. You will be utilized until you are no longer productive due to burnout and aging, and then you will be neutralized and sent to a place known as Elsewhere.
You are a basic slave of the new techno-plutocratic era the USA will enter into unless the American people decide to rebel and turn it around.
If this is not the case, humans will simply be replaced by robots, and then there will be the kind of class warfare depicted in Steven Spielberg’s and Stanley Kubrick’s film “Artificial Intelligence”.
Hopefully, the Revolution that Bernie started will continue and snowball.
Cyber participants, beware.
“This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.”
Very much agreed which is why I take my daily dose of antacid and keep reading Diane’s informative site.
“One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.
The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by tax funds generated largely from American business, and contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.”
“Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”
“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
Is it any wonder why no amount of statistical evidence has any effect on the reformers?
The goal is to align education k-U. To a vision that does not challenge corporate power.
Powell’s letter was to the chair of the National Chamber’s education committee.
“long-range planning and implementation”!!!!!!! 1971
Learn to Earn, or Learning is earning…
“Education…beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men –the balance wheel of the social machinery…It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor- (Learn to Earn).”
Horace Mann
I disagree on one minor point: the acting in this is palpably phony and more than subverts the slickness of the production. Why don’t they just rename the Ledger the Matrix and be done with it?
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
This is supposed to be the “vision of the future” of education???
All I can do is echo Peter Greene: “Oh my effing God.”
What will be the next proposal? Implanting microchips at birth to track everyone 24-7 (except, of course, for the babies of the 1%, whose children will never be exposed to these types of schools)? I mean, after all, they would love to make sure that everyone will be unthinking workers, consumers, and oh, let’s not forget voters.
(Yes, yes, I know, it does seem that we already have unthinking voters. Which is a big part of the problem.)
But where oh where would all of this become incorporated? Look no further than the home of 85% of U.S. companies… the First State… Delaware. On May 2nd, Delaware Governor Jack Markell announced his state would begin to look at changes in state regulations and state code to allow for Blockchain start-ups to come to Delaware.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/governor-markell-launches-delaware-blockchain-initiative-300260672.html
As well, we have a coding school in Delaware which was founded by Ben DuPont, of the legendary DuPont family of Delaware. The same family that actually created many of the “brown schools” in our state in the early 20th Century. Also a big supporter of charter schools.
This is what is has all been leading up to. And opt out? They love it. As long as they resist it just enough to issues threats and build the base for more parents opting out. Not wholesale, but steady increases. That way they can “realize the error of their ways” and lead us to a digital personalized learning competency-based education paradise where the state assessment is no longer given once a year, but throughout – in the form of end of unit online assessments. At the end of the year, the total scores will be calculated and serve as the official state assessments. Because these are also part of students grades and their ability to move on, the ability to opt out becomes moot. Teachers (or rather, glorified digital moderators), will get immediate feedback. The tests won’t be as long, so parents won’t have to worry.
They are three steps ahead of us, always. While we are lashing out about PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and teacher evaluations, they are laying the groundwork for all of this.
They can say this is an attempt to erase all inequity, but we know that is a false narrative. This is the corporate takeover of America. This is the end of public education.
But the question we ALL need to ask ourselves… how do we stop it? We are seeing coding classes in 3rd grade in Delaware. Are kids actually laying the groundwork for a lot of this already? You know this is a data-mining paradise for them.
The Rodel Foundation of Delaware has been pushing this in our state for a long time. Our State Board of Education and Dept. of Education are the most deceptive and fraudulent parts of our state.
If we want to save public education and, I’m going to say it, the future of the country, we have to act now.
Vote those frauds out of office in Delaware
Working on it Diane! Thank God Jack Markell will end his two-terms as Governor in January, but I would keep a close eye on him. Some have him pegged as the next Secretary of Education under Hillary. If not that, I can see him leading the charge for this Blockchain stuff with some company. I would everyone, in every state, to see which candidates are pushing education lingo like “more job training”, and “career pathways” and “coding schools”. Chances are probably pretty good they are all in on this junk science.
Reblogged this on Exceptional Delaware and commented:
This is, literally, the most important article you will read about education in your life. When you hear people talking about ESSA, and how they will help our kids, especially candidates, ask yourselves how much they know about this. How they are leading the people toward certain goals without them knowing what the endpoint is. This is horrifying. This WILL lead to more inequity than anything in modern history. This is what Common Core, high-stakes tests, personalized learning, teacher evaluations, charter schools, vo-tech schools, and everything else have been leading up to… the Blockchain.
Franz Kafka is (was) a distant cousin. LOL! True.
Just dropping a seed here. The sister of this and the prime instigator behind this is the drive to always cut taxes lower.
Lack of money is the driving force behind all these “cheaper” policies being sold as innovation, which hurt children almost as collateral damage.
Resist all those who urge the cutting of revenue, period. Everything and everybody needs more revenue, not less, and we are not just speaking of “schools”.. In a world of economic inequality, one must remember that all the taxes once coughed up by the 99% are dwindling now that most of the new wealth has gone upwards to the top 1%. At the very least, the very minimum, all that money the 99% used to pay but now can’t, should be levied as an increase to the top 1% to provide parity….
Bottom line to our reality? Don’t ever elect anyone who runs on cutting taxes again.. Choose those now, bold enough to say they will balance our nation’s books on the backs of the wealthy… Because that is the longward direction we need to go.
As I said in the beginning, to change teaching for the better, we need more money… That is the bottom line and once enough revenue is available to do education right, all these corporate programs will dry up for lack of market… But as long as there is a market, these will keep coming as fast as you can bat one down, another will spring up, and they will win.
Since these forms of games and computer embedded assessment cannot be stopped by opt out, what strategy/tactics can prevent the screen-based takeover? Resistance is fertile.
Oh, great–while reading this, just heard on the NBC Nightly News that the company that manufactures epi-pens (you know, those injections used to prevent seizures/possibly death in children experiencing a severe allergic attack)–upped the cost over 400% (has some senators/reps. “looking into it”).
Not only do corporations spew filth/poison into our air, water & food, causing so much more asthma & allergies, but while they aren’t forced to clean up, Big Pharm is, in fact, “cleaning up.”
“This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.”
“This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”
When I was first elected to the school board in 2005, then Mayor now Governor John Hickenlooper promised to visit all Denver Public Schools during his first term. He took elected BoE members to the schools in their districts where he proceeded to tell THIRD graders if they finished college – which he hollowly promised to aid – they could make a million dollars more over their careers. To thirds graders that sounded like a lot of money. I remember thinking, “why is he talking about money and not talking about becoming an educated, contributing member of our society?” I was always troubled by this line of reasoning.
Fast forward to now. In the Fall of 2015 now Governor Hickenlooper by Executive Order B 2015-004 established something called the Business Experiential Learning Commission. I am sorry I can’t seem to copy the link but if you go to BEL commission the first two links are the keys: BEL Commision “will develop, evaluate and implement a systemic solution for integrated work-based education and training to MEET THE NEEDS OF COLORADO’S ECONOMY “(my emphasis). It will do this through Certified Centers of Learning (CCOLs). Something called BASIC – Businesses and Schools in Colorado – ” will house the long-term Residency infrastructure” (sounding familiar). The state of Colorado , the BEL commission and others are joining the MARKLE Foindation and Linkedin’s Rework America Connected. No wonder Facebook ‘s Sheryl Sandberg is playing in DPS board elections. It’s all about the data gathering, isn’t it?
And the jobs in DPS being pushed? a general technician in manufacturing, an IT specialist, and something in banking yet TBD. Not exactly the decision makers. The wealthy will be the only ones to be truly educated. And few people even realize this is happening.
So sad.
Colorado’s K-12 workforce data badge pilot, partnered with Jobs for the Future, Markle, EdX, LinkedIn (now Microsoft), ASU, Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Education Initiative ( CEI has received over $30Mil from Gates to promote Common Core and SEL data collection) and others…
All via Hickenlooper and the BEL COMMISSION https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/BEL%20Commission%20Presentation_11-4-15.pdf
Thank you, ColoMom, for adding information and the link. I was having serious tech issues and couldn’t get the link right. Serious data collecting going on in the fly over state. And very serious job training, not educating, going on in Denver!!!
So it looks like Delaware is a key to if this takes off or not, as I just wrote. Our next General Assembly, which begins in January 2017, will assuredly have legislation allowing all these digital edu-blockchain whatever the heck they are to enter Delaware as corporate entities. But even bigger will be the “blockshares” legislation, which will be the equivalent of digital stocks. Since we are the hom to most US corporations as a tax shelter state… It looks like our state election is just as important in the national one!
https://exceptionaldelaware.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/jack-markell-blockchain-coding-schools-rodel-brinc-pathways-to-prosperity-registered-agents-delawares-role-in-the-ledger/
I am disgusted and terrified, but not the least bit surprised. I read some obscure stuff sometimes, and I really have a lot to say about this topic — about Gates’s attempts to use Big Data to map intelligence on the human genome, about digital currency, about Google and tracking, etc., etc. and etc. — but honestly, I am afraid I would just be called a conspiracy theorist and dismissed. My hat’s off to Peter Greene and Diane for posting this, though.
I read the same things. I think moving forward people are going to understand just how extreme and complicated things have gotten. Don’t be afraid to speak out. The upside of the quickened pace brought about by the ESSA means that if you say something, chances are it will show up in your backyard a few months from now and the people you told will start waking up.
And I JUST wrote about this company in the above article… Zip Code Wilmington, a Delaware coding school non-profit company founded by one of the DuPont heirs.. getting free money from President Obama
http://technical.ly/delaware/2016/08/16/zip-code-equip-program-wilmu/
Brought to us courtesy of a new program called EQUIP: Education Quality through Innovative Partnerships… http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/fact-sheet-department-education-launches-educational-quality-through-innovative-partnerships-equip-experiment-provide-low-income-students-access-new-models-education-and-training
This is rich. US DOE pours the money into coding schools like ZipCode Wilmiington under a guise of helping low-income students. But if you surf around ZipCode Wilmington’s website, it states they pull a lot of their students from the big bank call centers around Wilmington, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. They train them for 12 weeks, and then these students go back to the companies with the skills they’ve learned. So essentially the US DOE is now in the business of paying for corporate training as well.
Even better, as if these companies didn’t get enough tax breaks in Delaware, our legislators passed new laws sweetening the pot for them even more this year. And what caused the that? The Dow-DuPont merger which caused Dow to take a lot of highly-skilled employees to Iowa. And one of the DuPont kids started a coding school which is basically a middle man for even more corporate savings a la a Teach For America type program for computer coders.
And we really wonder how these companies get richer and richer…
Industry needs to provide it’s own training. For several years now they’ve pushed public education to do it for them at the students’ cost!!!! I find it hard to believe that an education for one job will also get a student a different job. A well rounded education gives them versatility so they can move between jobs to better themselves.
Diane and readers of this site, you might find it helpful to see the context for this video, which was presented as a future provocation and not an ideal image of the future. http://www.learningisearning2026.org/ If you visit the site, you will see that thousands of educators and young students were engaged in responding critically to this video, answering questions like, “What worries you about this possible future? What could go wrong is this future?” You may also be interested in the keynote that launched the online conversation about this possible future, in which it is expressly stated: “This is not an ideal image of the future. We think about possible futures to imagine what COULD happen, and to decide which futures we want to make real, and which we want to change or to avoid.” I think you’ve done a bit of a disservice to the nature of the project to ignore the context and I’m sure you and your readers would be interested in the vibrant discussion of this future, which is a possibility but certainly not an inevitability and certainly not a hoped for future by many. However, that said, many people expressed a great deal of hope about optimism about certain aspects of the scenario, and that is worth paying attention to as well. You can see more than 11,000 responses to this fictional future scenario here: http://www.learningisearning2026.org/dashboard. And the keynote launching the conversation is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKvMmtclUBA
Jane, thank you for responding. I actually watched the whole video the other night and read many of the comments on the dashboard. With all due respect, if this is only a possible future, why didn’t we see other “potential” ideas? Why just this one big Blockchain edublocks idea? I have to imagine a lot of time went into this presentation (which was well done by the way)?
In my time, as a parent with no ties to any group, organization, political party, or lobbying group, who has studied “education reform” on my own free time without one cent coming to me, I have found that many “futurists” have ten year plans that do wind up happening. A company called the Rodel Foundation began planning in 2005 for what education would look like in 2015. The public bought it and it ushered in high-stakes testing, Common Core, accountability standards that most folks hate now, and many damaging aspects in public education. Your video talks about looking at the signs. I have seen the signs, all over the place: in the Every Student Succeeds Act, in the testing being done, in the lack of respect for traditional school district teachers, school choice, the rise of charter schools, many “Pathways to Prosperity” programs going on, apprenticeships that actually give profit to corporations more than the apprentice, and so much more.
When I see things like this, I see plans already under way to make it happen. Can I prove it 100%? No. But if I’ve learned one thing in education, if someone is talking about it at a big presentation, more than likely it will happen.
Personally, I see many problems with this scenario for education. When I heard you speaking about digital badges, many parents have been researching this rarely talked about thing. The data-mining going on with this is unprecedented. This is all corporate education, not true education. This is what Wall Street wants, not parents and teachers. Education will always have issues, but when those decisions are taken from the stakeholders that matter the most, it is sad to see. Education should always be about the children and nothing else. With this corporate invasion in education, our children will lose more than they ever realize.
I appreciate what you are trying to do, but please ask yourself if this is more for corporations or children.
Kevin, as a 50-year old futures organization we fully understand the responsibility that comes with engaging people in systematically thinking about the future. If you delve deeper into IFTF’s work on the future of education/learning you will see that we have been exploring many different scenarios, including this one http://www.iftf.org/iftf-you/programs-initiatives/future-of-learning/. We see it as our responsibility to bring to the public’s attention potential opportunities and challenges that come each generation of new technologies. Please do take time to explore and read more of our work.
I’m sorry Marina, I don’t see how digital badges and all this technology will replace the creativity of teachers. Forcing young people to play the role of teacher and student and getting rid of traditional schools is not the answer. This is the corporate answer. Education is not about corporations. It is about education. And you may state that it is about different scenarios, but the Blockchain push is going on right now, as we speak, in several different countries, like Australia, China and many others. We have companies in Delaware that are pushing this technology. The writing is on the wall. And if this wasn’t the case, why does IFTF keep pushing similar initiatives at major trade shows? http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/61084?utm_content=buffer7bce6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
I have explored a lot of your IFTF’s work. I see a lot of innovation thoughts and whatnot. But with a growing trend and rising numbers of students with disabilities, what stops them from getting left behind in this new digital utopia?
If IFTF is truly about different ideas, why is Jane speaking at so many conferences about The Ledger?
http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/jane-mcgonigal-at-aspen-ideas-festival-2016/
This is the problem with education. We have far too many corporate people deciding what to do. They speak at these millionaire and billionaire clubs, like the Aspen Institute. Folks tend to invest in this stuff. And presto! We have a new idea that we are going to start planning NOW! With very little thought to how it will actually work out for children.
I also see a lot of hammering on the technology that came before by beating up how people viewed it in their beginning stages. What is parents don’t want their children to be in non-classroom and online digital campuses? Who is asking us these questions? Certainly not Jack Markell, who as Governor of Delaware already pushed our students and teachers over the cliff into the cesspool of corporate education reform. Certainly not President Obama or Hillary Clinton who are all about this “new future”. Certainly not Jane McGonigal, or yourself. When you present an idea once or twice, that is one thing. But when you make it a central highlight, that is another thing altogether. That is a commercial. https://www.fastcoexist.com/1681507/the-future-of-education-eliminates-the-classroom-because-the-world-is-your-class
Jane McGonigal,
In this world of “earning is learning”, Who owns the student’s personal data? Who decides how it’s collected, if it’s accurate, who the data is shared with and how that data profiles a child for life ?
What if students’ data reflects poorly on them and predicts that they will in fact NOT be earning?
Have you given thought to student privacy in this new data centric world? Will there be room in this world for those who want to opt out, not have their child data tracked?