Stephen Downes

This is a reprint of a paywalled NY Times article arguing that "industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students... a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain." There's an archive version in case the Reddit post disappears. Certainly it is true that tech corporations do a lot of their marketing through schools. But I think it's misleading to suggest this tactic is limited to "a handful of giants". At one point the article observes, "Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children's environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children's biology teachers." But that's exactly what happens in both environment programs and in medicine. And almost everywhere else, from foreign policy to book fairs to culinary arts. In the new world of the engineered apprenticeship, this influence becomes harder to detect and at the same time more pervasive.