Most of us who work in education got into it because we believed it could change something. I certainly did. Standing in front of my high school English classes, I thought the work was straightforward: help young people think critically, engage with ideas, and develop the skills to navigate a complex world. Paulo Freire’s observation that education either maintains conformity or creates paths to freedom was, at that point, just something I had read. It took years of designing learning experiences for both students and teachers before I understood how that tension operates in practice, and how often I have found myself on the wrong side of it.

What follows is an attempt to map some of the structural problems I see in modern education, particularly where technology and market logic intersect. These are not new critiques. Thinkers far sharper than me have been naming these patterns for decades. But I think they are worth revisiting, especially for those of us who build tools and design experiences inside these systems every day. The fact that we can name the problems does not mean we have solved them, or that we are exempt from perpetuating them.

Knowledge as Commodity

The transformation of knowledge into something that can be packaged, sold, and consumed is not a recent development. What has changed is the speed and sophistication of that process. I have watched it accelerate through my own career trajectory: from teaching literature and writing to implementing personalized learning platforms, promoting coding initiatives, and designing blended learning models. Each step felt like progress at the time. In hindsight, many of those moves served market interests at least as much as educational ones, and sometimes more.

What Herbert Marcuse warned about technology establishing new forms of social control becomes difficult to ignore when you spend your days inside educational technology systems. Every time I design a personalized learning pathway or develop a competency-based framework, I am conscious of the possibility that I am making the machinery of educational commodification more efficient, more palatable, and more difficult for anyone to resist. The tools get better. The question is whether “better” means better for learners or better at converting learning into a market transaction.

The STEM Imperative

The current emphasis on STEM education deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. Just as nineteenth-century industrialization required a newly literate workforce for clerical and management positions, today’s technology industry shapes educational priorities to serve its labor needs. This is not conspiracy thinking. It is the system functioning as designed.

The push for STEM education, which I have actively participated in promoting, often seems less about empowering students and more about ensuring a surplus labor force that keeps wages competitive for technology companies. When we frame coding as a universal skill that every child must learn, we should ask who benefits most from that framing. The answer is not always the students.

That said, naming this dynamic does not make it simple. STEM skills do open doors for individual students, particularly those from under-resourced communities. The problem is not that we teach science and math. The problem is the way market logic captures and redirects the purpose of that teaching, turning what could be liberatory knowledge into workforce preparation optimized for someone else’s balance sheet.

The False Promise of Progressive Education

What we label “personalized learning” often amounts to allowing students to progress at different speeds toward standardized endpoints. What we call “competency-based” frequently reduces learning to a checklist of marketable skills. The journey of learning, with its messy questions, unexpected discoveries, and genuinely transformative moments, gets streamlined into efficient skill acquisition.

The platforms many of us help implement wear the language of progressive education while serving traditional market interests. They promise student-centered learning while actually centering workplace demands and market metrics. They promote “engagement” while engineering compliance, “creativity” while ensuring standardization. I have configured these platforms. I have trained others to use them. The contradiction does not escape me.

The part that often gets overlooked is how effectively this appropriation works. When a learning management system uses the vocabulary of agency and choice, it becomes harder to critique the system without sounding like you are against agency and choice. The language of liberation gets repurposed as a marketing tool, and the rest of us are left trying to do genuine work inside frameworks that were never designed for genuine work.

Reproduction of Inequality

Moving between well-funded and struggling schools has shown me how our educational system operates in ways Pierre Bourdieu would have found predictable. The system reproduces existing social hierarchies with remarkable precision. The disparities Jonathan Kozol documented decades ago have not disappeared. They have gone digital.

When I think about professional development programs, I have to constantly confront how material conditions affect implementation. The same strategies yield vastly different results depending on a school’s resources, its community’s infrastructure, and the degree to which its educators are stretched thin across multiple roles. A school with reliable internet, sufficient devices, and dedicated instructional support staff will implement the same training in fundamentally different ways than a school where a single teacher handles six preparations and the Wi-Fi drops during third period.

Technology was supposed to level this playing field. In some narrow cases, it has. In the broader picture, it has created new forms of the same inequalities, now mediated through platform access, data infrastructure, and the growing gap between schools that can afford to be thoughtful about technology adoption and those that simply adopt whatever they can get.

Student Alienation

The familiar refrain of “When will I ever use this?” echoes through classrooms not as genuine curiosity but as a symptom of what Ivan Illich called the “schooled” mind, trained to value knowledge only for its market utility. Students approach their education as if making deposits at a bank, storing facts and skills to be withdrawn later for employment. This is exactly the banking model Freire warned against, and it is now codified into the architecture of our learning platforms.

I first noticed this in my English classroom, where students struggled to see the point of reading literature that would not appear on a certification exam. I see it now on a larger scale in the way educational technology platforms frame learning outcomes almost exclusively in terms of career readiness and measurable competencies. The message, delivered through interface design as much as through curriculum, is that learning has value only insofar as it can be converted into economic productivity.

Working Within While Questioning

My role in educational technology forces me to sit with uncomfortable questions about complicity and change. How do we work within systems we critique? Can we use tools designed for market efficiency to create spaces for genuine learning?

Each professional development session I design, each learning platform I help configure, each curriculum I help develop exists within a system that has a remarkable capacity to absorb reform. Every attempted progressive movement seems to get metabolized and repurposed. Personalized learning becomes automated tracking. Student-centered instruction becomes workforce preparation. Critical thinking becomes a marketable skill, stripped of whatever made it actually critical.

Even our critiques get absorbed. The language of equity shows up in vendor pitch decks. “Human-centered design” becomes a product feature rather than a philosophical commitment. The system does not resist reform so much as digest it.

Beyond False Hope

The uncomfortable reality is that these systems are remarkably resilient. Every attempted reform, every progressive educational movement, seems to get transformed into another tool for maintaining the status quo. Those of us working within these systems face a choice that is not really a choice at all: continue our complicity while trying to carve out small spaces for authentic learning, or leave the system entirely, only to be replaced by others who might not even recognize the contradictions we struggle with. Neither option leads anywhere particularly hopeful.

The path forward, if there is one, will not come from new teaching methods, innovative technologies, or reformed curricula. These solutions remain trapped within the logic of the market that produced the problems in the first place. Real transformation would require dismantling the economic structures that shape education, a task well beyond what any of us can accomplish in our classrooms or through our instructional designs.

In the meantime, we continue our work with clear eyes about its limitations. We design learning experiences knowing they will be constrained by market demands. We implement technologies understanding their role in surveillance and control. We prepare students for a future we wish were different, while hoping they might someday build something better than what we have managed. This is not the conclusion anyone wants, but it may be the most honest one available to those of us who have spent enough time inside the machinery to understand how it works.