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’d 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’ve 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 aren’t new critiques, and thinkers far sharper than me have been naming these patterns for decades. But I think they’re worth revisiting, especially for those of us who build tools and design experiences inside these systems every day. Being able to name the problems doesn’t mean we’ve solved them, or that we’re exempt from perpetuating them.
Knowledge as Commodity
The transformation of knowledge into something that can be packaged, sold, and consumed isn’t a recent development. What has changed is the speed and sophistication of that process. I’ve watched it accelerate through my own career: 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.
Herbert Marcuse’s warning that technology could establish new forms of social control becomes hard 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’m conscious that I may be making the machinery of educational commodification more efficient, more palatable, and harder for anyone to resist. The tools keep getting better, and 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. That isn’t conspiracy thinking so much as the system functioning as designed.
The push for STEM education, which I’ve actively helped promote, 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 every child must learn, we should ask who benefits most from that framing, and the answer isn’t always the students.
That said, naming this dynamic doesn’t make it simple. STEM skills do open doors for individual students, particularly those from under-resourced communities. The problem isn’t that we teach science and math but 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 letting students progress at different speeds toward standardized endpoints. What we call “competency-based” frequently reduces learning to a checklist of marketable skills. The messy questions, unexpected discoveries, and genuinely transformative moments of learning get 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 centering workplace demands and market metrics, and they promote “engagement” while engineering compliance and “creativity” while ensuring standardization. I’ve configured these platforms and trained others to use them, and the contradiction doesn’t escape me.
What 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’re 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 it.
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, reproducing existing social hierarchies with remarkable precision. The disparities Jonathan Kozol documented decades ago haven’t disappeared; they’ve gone digital.
When I think about professional development programs, I have to keep confronting how material conditions affect implementation. The same strategies yield very different results depending on a school’s resources, its community’s infrastructure, and how thin its educators are stretched across multiple roles. A school with reliable internet, enough devices, and dedicated instructional support staff will implement the same training in fundamentally different ways than a school where a single teacher handles six preps 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 less as genuine curiosity than as a symptom of what Ivan Illich meant by being “schooled,” learning to confuse a diploma with competence and to value knowledge for what it can be exchanged for. Students approach their education as if making deposits at a bank, storing facts and skills to withdraw later for employment. That’s the banking model Freire warned against, and it’s 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 wouldn’t 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, and each curriculum I help develop exists within a system with a remarkable capacity to absorb reform. Progressive movements seem to get metabolized and repurposed, so that personalized learning becomes automated tracking, student-centered instruction becomes workforce preparation, and critical thinking becomes a marketable skill, stripped of whatever made it critical.
Even our critiques get absorbed. The language of equity shows up in vendor pitch decks, and “human-centered design” becomes a product feature rather than a philosophical commitment. The system doesn’t resist reform so much as digest it.
Beyond False Hope
The uncomfortable reality is that these systems are remarkably resilient. Those of us working within them face a choice that isn’t 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, won’t 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’ll 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’ve managed. This isn’t the conclusion anyone wants, but it may be the most honest one available to those of us who’ve spent enough time inside the machinery to understand how it works.
A note added September 2026: I wrote this in December 2024, and I would not soften the diagnosis. The ending is another matter. The “small spaces” I described as a consolation have since become the working question in most of what I write here: what a practitioner can build, refuse, or keep hold of inside the machinery without pretending the machinery is gone. That argument continues in Teaching Realism and Where Design Authority Lives, and runs through the vibe-coding thread.
If you’ve found your own ways of working inside the machinery, I’d like to hear about them. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.
