Los Angeles Review of Books
Matt Seybold,
Los Angeles Review of Books,
Mar 03, 2023
In the most trenchant of prose Matt Seybold connects the Graduate Students' Association (TUGSA) strike at Temple University with the venture capitalist model of ed tech to call out both for a basic lack of ethics. To them, he says, the workers are "human capital' that needs be written off, the sunk costs of an obsolescent model, and their strike a welcome opportunity for a 'market disruption' in 'people management.'" The review is way overstated, but it's not wrong. That's the model: "It combines mostly automated and 'self-guided' remote asynchronous coursework with 'applied assessments' that require 'learners' to pay for the opportunity to donate their labor to businesses who rebrand entry-level drudgery as cutting-edge training." But it's not edtech that's the problem here (seriously). "What is really broken is not public education; it's the devouring model of private equity."
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