Schools normalize exploitative digital tools, teaching students tech’s harms are natural and inevitable

Evidence

The strategies highlighted above are only some of the oppressive techniques that surveillance capitalists use to reproduce passive users, or users who neither expect nor are able to critically understand how digital technology mediates their everyday activities nor participate in shaping that mediation according to their own interests. What I’d like to argue here is that the power of these strategies is doubly amplified by their normalization within institutions of schooling. By passively accepting digital tools that deny users the right to study and modify code, exploit user data, and impose surveillance and control on users, we are teaching students that these technological qualities are natural, neutral, and inevitable. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 540

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the grafting article’s theme of infrastructure naturalization, though the strongest tie is to Freire’s pedagogy lens. Also connects to the idea of schools silently acculturating students into acceptance of given material conditions.
• SEED: Angle for the reader: schools’ passive adoption of surveillance platforms quietly teaches students that opaque, extractive tools are natural — a consumer-education problem in the same genre as the tree-as-infrastructure piece.
• XREF: connects to: Schools normalize surveillant software by passively adopting it — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 540; Web 2.0 technologies teach self-regulation along business ideals like public schooling did — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 34; Schools form attention in ways that can serve exploitation, not just freedom

Broader Connections

• Schools normalize surveillant software by passively adopting it #expands (0.82) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 540
• Schools form attention in ways that can serve exploitation, not just freedom #expands (0.78)
• Web 2.0 technologies teach self-regulation along business ideals like public schooling did #exemplifies (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 34