There’s a character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy I think about occasionally. His name is Sax Russell, a physicist and one of the first hundred scientists sent to colonize Mars, and he spends the early part of the trilogy absolutely certain that his work is apolitical. Science, in Sax’s view, is about understanding and manipulating the physical world, and it operates on evidence, method, and rigor. Politics, emotions, and competing values are distractions from the real work of making Mars habitable. If you just do the science correctly, Sax believes, the outcomes will speak for themselves.
He’s wrong, and it takes him about a century to fully understand how wrong. Watching that understanding develop across three novels and nearly two thousand pages is one of the most useful things I’ve read for thinking about what we actually do when we implement educational technology.
Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, published across the 1990s) follows the colonization and transformation of Mars over roughly two hundred years. It’s dense, deliberate science fiction, full of geological descriptions and committee meetings and long arguments about atmospheric chemistry. It’s also, underneath all of that, a sustained argument that technical decisions are always ethical decisions. Every system we build encodes values whether we intend it to or not, and the people who build those systems have a responsibility to understand what they’re encoding.
If you haven’t read the books, that’s fine, and I’ll give you enough of Sax’s story to follow the argument. The reason I keep coming back to this particular piece of fiction is that Robinson does something rare: he shows, in granular detail, what it looks like when a brilliant technical person gradually realizes their work was never as neutral as they believed.
The Technocrat’s Blind Spot
When Sax arrives on Mars, he’s already one of the most respected scientists on the mission. He’s brilliant, methodical, and deeply committed to the project of terraforming, the long process of transforming Mars’s atmosphere, temperature, and surface conditions to support human life without pressure suits. For Sax, this is an engineering challenge with an engineering solution: you study the variables, design interventions (greenhouse gas cocktails, orbital mirrors, genetically engineered organisms), measure the results, and adjust, which amounts to the scientific method applied at planetary scale.
What Sax doesn’t initially see is that every terraforming decision is also a decision about values. How fast should the atmosphere change? That isn’t simply a question about chemistry. It’s also a question about who benefits first, who bears the risks, and whose vision of Mars’s future gets prioritized. The “Greens,” Sax’s faction, want aggressive terraforming because they believe a habitable Mars is better than a dead one. The “Reds,” led by geologist Ann Clayborne, argue that Mars’s original landscape has intrinsic value that shouldn’t be destroyed for human convenience. Between these poles, every technical parameter, from parts-per-million targets to species introductions, carries embedded assumptions about what matters and who gets to decide.
Robinson doesn’t make this a simple morality play. Sax isn’t a villain; he genuinely believes he’s doing good work, and in many ways he is. The problem lies in his framework rather than his intentions. He has a mental model in which technical excellence and ethical responsibility are separate domains, and that separation allows him to make consequential decisions without examining their full implications.
This is a framework I encounter regularly in EdTech implementation, and it tends to show up in at least three places: 1) a conversation about platform selection that focuses on features and integration capabilities without asking what the platform’s data practices assume about student privacy, 2) a discussion about assessment design that centers on psychometric validity without examining what the assessment’s structure rewards and what it renders invisible, and 3) a district adopting a “personalized learning” system without asking whose definition of personalization is baked into the algorithm, or what model of learning its recommendations are optimized around.
The technical questions are real and they matter, and I’m not suggesting we ignore them. But Sax’s story is a reminder that treating technical questions as if they exist in a separate category from ethical questions is itself an ethical choice, and it’s one that tends to benefit the people who already have power over how systems get designed.
What breaks the framework open?
Sax’s transformation comes through damage rather than argument or persuasion.
In Green Mars, decades after the failed revolution of 2061, Sax is working undercover in Burroughs when he’s arrested by security forces and tortured. He’s left with brain damage that alters his capacity for language and social connection, and in the aftermath he has to relearn how to communicate, how to read social cues, and how to navigate relationships that previously seemed irrelevant to his work. Robinson writes this as a forced expansion of perception rather than a punishment. The injury doesn’t make Sax less intelligent so much as differently intelligent, and the parts of human experience that his previous cognitive framework filtered out as noise become legible to him for the first time.
What follows across the second and third books is a slow, uneven process of integration. Sax doesn’t abandon science or become a politician or an activist; he remains, at his core, a person who wants to understand and shape the physical world. But his understanding of what “the physical world” includes expands to take in the social systems that determine how scientific knowledge gets used. He begins to see that the terraforming debate was never just about atmospheric chemistry. It was about competing visions of what a good society looks like, and chemistry was the medium through which those visions were enacted.
He falls in love with Ann Clayborne, his ideological opposite, which Robinson uses to dramatize the idea that genuine understanding requires engaging with perspectives that challenge your foundational assumptions rather than dismissing them as outside your domain. Sax doesn’t come to agree with Ann, but he does come to understand that her objections to terraforming aren’t anti-scientific. They emerge from a different set of values applied to the same evidence, and a purely technical framework has no way to adjudicate between them.
I don’t have a brain injury story to offer as a parallel. What I have is the slower, less dramatic version of the same realization that comes from years of implementation work, and it tends to arrive in moments: when you realize that the LMS configuration you set up privileges certain kinds of participation over others, and that this isn’t a bug you can fix with a settings change but a reflection of assumptions built into the platform’s architecture; when a district’s data dashboard makes certain student outcomes hyper-visible while rendering others structurally invisible, and you understand that the dashboard isn’t simply reporting reality but shaping what counts as reality for the people who use it; and when you recognize that “we chose this tool because it integrates well with our existing systems” is also a statement about which existing systems you’ve decided not to question.
The Hidden Curriculum of Systems
There’s a concept in critical pedagogy that Robinson’s trilogy illustrates with unusual clarity, even though he never uses the term. It’s the idea of the hidden curriculum: the lessons a system teaches through its structure, incentives, and defaults, regardless of what it officially claims to teach. Philip Jackson coined the term in 1968, and thinkers like Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Michael Apple have developed it in different directions since then. The core insight is that educational systems don’t simply deliver content. They model relationships to authority, define what counts as legitimate knowledge, sort people into categories, and normalize particular ways of being in the world, and they do this whether anyone designs them to or not.
On Robinson’s Mars, the hidden curriculum of the terraforming project is visible at planetary scale. The Greens’ approach to atmospheric transformation doesn’t simply change the air; it creates a world optimized for a particular kind of human life, one that resembles Earth. That optimization makes Mars more hospitable for Earth-born immigrants, which accelerates immigration, which shifts the political balance, which threatens the autonomy of the people who built the society in the first place. The technical parameters of terraforming, parameters that Sax originally treated as pure engineering, turn out to encode a political program, since making Mars more Earth-like makes it easier for Earth to control.
The parallel to educational technology isn’t subtle. Every system we implement in a district has a hidden curriculum. An LMS that organizes content into linear modules teaches students that learning is sequential, even if we believe it isn’t. A gradebook that weights summative assessments at 80% teaches students (and teachers) that performance on demand matters more than growth over time, regardless of what our assessment philosophy document says. A “personalized learning” platform that generates recommendations based on standardized performance data teaches students that their learning path should be determined by algorithmic interpretation of their deficits, not by their interests, contexts, or self-knowledge.
None of these are inevitable. They’re design choices, and they can be made differently, but only if the people implementing the systems recognize them as choices in the first place rather than treating them as technical defaults that simply came with the package.
This is where Sax’s arc is most instructive. His blind spot was less ignorance than category confusion. He placed ethical questions in a separate bucket from technical questions, and because he was brilliant at the technical work, he never had to confront what was in the other bucket until it was forced on him. The equivalent in our field is treating platform selection, system configuration, data architecture, and integration design as technical problems with technical solutions, when they’re actually design problems with embedded values that shape outcomes for real people.
What does Robinson get right about expertise?
One of the things Robinson does throughout the trilogy that I find particularly relevant is his treatment of how expertise functions in a community. The First Hundred are all experts, scientists, engineers, psychologists, and ecologists selected from the best in their fields. And yet their expertise, applied without attention to context and values, repeatedly produces outcomes that none of them intended.
The longevity treatments are the clearest example. Martian scientists develop a therapy that dramatically extends human lifespan, which is, from a technical standpoint, an extraordinary achievement. But the decision about who gets access to the treatment, and what political consequences follow from that decision, can’t be answered by the science that produced it. On Mars, the treatment is distributed broadly. On Earth, it becomes a source of massive inequality, accelerating the tensions that eventually lead to world war. The same technical achievement produces liberation in one context and catastrophe in another, depending entirely on the social and political systems that govern its distribution.
Robinson isn’t arguing against expertise so much as against expertise that doesn’t account for its own context. Sax is a better scientist by the end of the trilogy, not a worse one, because he has expanded his understanding of what his science affects. His technical knowledge stays intact while his awareness of what that knowledge connects to grows.
This framing has changed how I think about my own role. When I help a district implement a system, my technical expertise (platform administration, API integrations, configuration design, training development) is necessary; it’s the reason I’m in the room. But it isn’t sufficient, and if I treat it as sufficient, I’m making the same category error Sax makes. The technical implementation is always also a values implementation, and the question is whether I’m paying attention to both layers or only the one I was trained to see.
Toward a More Honest Practice
I want to be careful here not to overstate the lesson. Robinson’s Sax Russell has the luxury of two hundred years and a planetary-scale laboratory to work through his understanding, while we have quarterly reviews and limited budgets. I’m not arguing that every platform configuration meeting needs to become a seminar on critical pedagogy. I’m arguing that the separation between “technical work” and “values work” is artificial, and that maintaining it makes us worse at both.
In practice, this looks like a set of questions I try to bring into implementation conversations alongside the technical ones rather than in place of them: 1) What does this system make easy to see, and what does it make hard to see? 2) Whose workflow does this design optimize for, and whose does it complicate? 3) What assumptions about learning are built into this platform’s defaults, and do those assumptions match what we actually believe about how people learn? 4) If a student or teacher could see the logic behind this system’s recommendations, would they recognize their own experience in it?
These aren’t questions with clean answers. They’re questions that keep the ethical dimension of technical work visible, which is all I think we can reasonably ask of ourselves. Robinson doesn’t give Sax a formula for integrating technical and ethical reasoning, only a gradually expanding awareness that the two were never separate in the first place.
The Martian constitution that eventually emerges from the trilogy’s long political process reflects this integration. Its environmental court has the authority to evaluate laws not just on procedural or economic grounds but on ecological ones, so technical decisions about terraforming have to pass through a framework that explicitly accounts for values. The system isn’t perfect, and Robinson shows it being gamed, challenged, and revised throughout the third book. But it represents an institutional commitment to the principle that technical and ethical questions belong in the same conversation, evaluated by the same process, subject to the same accountability.
We don’t have environmental courts for educational technology. What we have is our own professional judgment, applied in the rooms where implementation decisions get made. Robinson’s trilogy has made me more attentive to what’s in those rooms beyond the technical requirements, and more willing to name it when I see it. That isn’t a dramatic transformation. It’s more like Sax’s slow expansion of perception, an ongoing process of noticing what was always there but didn’t fit the original framework.
If you’re doing similar work, helping districts navigate EdTech decisions that are always partly technical and partly something else, I’d like to hear how you think about the relationship between those two layers. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and you can find more of my writing on education, technology, and design at bradylicht.com.
