“Did Somebody Say Computers?” Professional and Ethical Repercussions of the Vocationalization and Commercialization of Education

Abstract

The federal and corporate initiative to technologize education has transformed schools, colleges, and universities into a new frontier for the computer industry. While educational institutions have maintained an equivocal relationship with markets and the state, they had striven to preserve a simulacrum of independence until the early 1980s. Then, neoconservative ideologies and their accompanying discourse on restructuring education discovered in the computer the ideal neutral tool to promote, in its virtual clothes, their gospel. The Clinton administration and big corporations, taking advantage of the myth of the computer and the new vocabulary associated with computers, launched a massive program of wiring schools. The process, still unfolding at a rapid pace, poses grave problems for the teaching profession and the role of schools in society. The author argues that the unethical ways in which computers force their ways into many educational institutions, the values they embody, the contexts of their multiple usages, the hyperfragmentation and increasing commodification of knowledge that they cause through online education, the vocationalization of education, and the atomization of teachers are likely to shrink pedagogical and democratic possibilities both at local and global levels.