On top of all that, we can add what Brownlee started with in his video: overeager A:B tests feel like software’s version of gaslighting. How can you trust an app if it feels like it’s changing without rhyme and reason seemingly on a weekly basis, whose changes are not announced or documented anywhere (small A:B tests never are), and when other people don’t see the things you see?
If we want something different for children – and by extension, something different for society as a whole – then we probably need to articulate a progressive vision for education. Because we should want to ensure that a pushback on “the digital” doesn’t simply result in the same bad shit, just in analog form.
The subversion of democracy – at its core, that is what the efforts to undermine public school truly are – has shifted the burden of changing “the system” onto the individual. Such is goal of the neoliberal fantasy, in which everything is reduced to a market transaction.
As such, it’s up to individual parents and individual students to make “the right choices” – even though it’s so clear that the institutions they must navigate are social, both in origin and in practice, and the only way to address the grave flaws that remain in these systems is political. The only way forward is together; our responsibility is shared; it is collective.