The Colonial Residues of Anticipatory Governance: Historicizing the Technopolitics of Learning Management Systems in Transnational School Reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Capitalizing (on) a Global Learning Crisis: EdTech and the Political

Proposal

The paper historicizes how learning management systems are creating a durable structure for capital accumulation by enabling future earnings to be sold and wagered on in the present. Focusing on NewGlobe Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its subsidiary, Bridge International Academies in Kenya, It examines examine how learning management systems connect the learning sciences, educational policymaking, and curriculum development with finance markets by reducing learning to a single, measurable unit, thereby rendering human ontology available for surveillance, intervention, and manipulation through financial speculation (Santori, 2024; Santori et al., 2016; Moeller et al., 2024).

I examine learning management systems as part of a broader technopolitical process, one enabling the rapid proliferation of results-based financing to address ‘learning poverty’ in the global South (World Bank, 2022). Rather than take them for granted as a technological inevitability, the paper historicizes the practices that make it possible (Foucault, 1991). Doing so allows me to examine how they colonize the future by governing in an anticipatory mode—a memory of a future that appears destined to come (Adams et al., 2009; Mitchell, 2020; in education see Robertson, 2022)—the necessary means to address the crises of achievement gaps and pandemic learning loss, what the World Bank terms ‘learning poverty” (2022).

The paper’s empirical claims draw from an archive that examine learning management systems’ four historical conditions of possibility, which include: 1) the role of learning science in explaining individual growth and development; 2) economics’ role in evaluating nations’ productive capacities; 3) sociological theories of development and modernization; and 4) cybernetic systems analyses of of coding and pattern recognition. Across these domains, the analysis traces the historical emergence of standards for classifying, ordering, and dividing people. Historicizing traces the epistemological rules and principles that make possible the objects of reflection and action in educational governance (Foucault, 1991; in education, see --, -- & Author, Author, 2025). The analysis traces how learning standards translate norms and values into quantifiable metrics and benchmarks. The study’s archive includes relevant policy documents, organizational reports, and academic literature accumulated both from historical archives in the U.S. and Kenya and on-the-ground and digital fieldwork studying Bridge International Academies and related reforms. I supplement this with research on ongoing practices of datafication and financialization in the global South.

The analysis illustrates how learning management systems form part of an epistemic and material infrastructure that colonizes the future. This is because these systems solidify learning as something objectively ‘out there’ in the world, brought into being through repeated practices of quantification, comparison, and ranking. By doing so, they not only project wide swaths of the global South as ‘lacking’ in fundamental skills and competencies ‘necessary’ for the 21st century, enabling the quantification of outcomes amenable to financial valuation, speculation, and profit. This analysis illustrates the epistemic and material infrastructure of how educational governance gets done by reinscribing principles that decide who is and is not yet ready to participate in the future.

Author

• Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison