What Is Wrong With Educationalizing Technological Unemployment?

• In Event: 51.063 - Education and Technological Unemployment: Dilemmas and Possibilities

Abstract

This presentation outlines the history of educationalisation of various social problems (Tyack and Cuban, 1995; Smeyers and Daepepe, 2008; Cuban and Jandrić, 2015). It introduces the issue of technological unemployment, and maps the main attempts at its educationalisation (Jandrić, 2017). From here though, due to an increasingly expanding technological view of society, it highlights a need to examine the educationalisation of social issues in hand with technologisation. It takes these arguments even further, to include much more than the obvious technologies that can lead directly to unemployment.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the presentation shows that the increasing neoliberalisation of the HE sector creates the higher education ‘law of gravitation’ which disperses responsibility of academics for actual content of policy documents. This is reflected in policy discourse which transfers academics’ individual and collective human agency to faceless ‘techno-fixes’ and ‘edu-fixes’, where various social effects of education, including but far from limited to employability, are transferred from people to abstract ‘actors’ such as policy documents, marketplaces, technologies, education at large. Such transfer of responsibility is based on two dialectically interconnected utopian ideas: (1) If we provide enough education, work markets will take care of themselves, and (2) If we provide enough technology, work markets will take care of themselves (Peters, Jandrić, and Hayes, 2018).
Analysing utopian ideas about relationships between education, technology, and employability we arrive to two conclusions. First, the ‘law of gravitation’ which claims that more education and more technology will somehow resolve the problem of educational unemployment is at least unsupported by evidence, if not plainly wrong. Second, utopian ‘techno-fixes’ and ‘edu-fixes’ have strong underpinnings in ideology of neoliberalism. In policy documents, the lack of agency which Beck (1992) identified a decade ago has developed into a more advanced form: omission of humans, and transfer of agency to abstract concepts such as policy documents and education at large. This trend is not a naive example of utopian or animistic thinking, because it strongly supports a certain kind of social development—it is through policy documents that places of learning shape a significant part of their future. In this way, educationalisation and technologisation of technological unemployment become battlefields between opposed worldviews and ideologies, and sites for emancipatory resistance.

References
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: SAGE.
Cuban, L., & Jandrić, P. (2015). The dubious promise of educational technologies: Historical patterns and future challenges. E-Learning and Digital Media, 12(3–4), 425–439.
Jandrić, P. (2017). Learning in the Age of Digital Reason. Rotterdam: Sense. 
Peters, M. A.; Jandrić, P. & Hayes, S. (2018). The curious promise of educationalising technological unemployment: What can places of learning really do about the future of work? Educational Philosophy and Theory, OnlineFirst.
Smeyers, P. & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2008). Educational research: The educationalization of social problems. Dordrecht: Springer.
Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward Utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Author

• Petar Jandric, Polytechnic of Zagreb