A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Eli Luberoff, the founder and CEO of Desmos. It was news I'd been anticipating — dreading, really — for some time: the startup had been acquired. Amplify was buying its curriculum division; the calculator part would become a free-standing public benefit corporation. The subject of the email from Eli said "good news," and I don't mean to imply that it isn't a good deal for him, for his employees, for his investors, or for Desmos users. But for me, well, it was a sign of something else altogether. (That said, let's check back in in a few years and see how this all has panned out, okay?) For a long, long time, if anyone asked me if there was any ed-tech I liked — and I would get this question a lot, often asked as though it was some sort of "gotcha" — I'd reply in a heartbeat, "Desmos." I adore Eli; and Desmos has always had a great team, including, of course, the incredible Dan Meyer (who I also adore, even though I blame him whenever I chose the slowest check-out lane in the grocery store.) I loved that Desmos' free online graphing calculator subverted the $100+ graphing calculator racket — a racket controlled by a couple of manufacturers and a handful of standardized test companies. But even more than that, I loved that the spirit and culture of the company, which despite providing an instrument for math, was not strictly instrumentalist. This is absolutely a rarity in ed-tech, where almost everything is touted for its supposed productivity, efficiency, time- and cost-savings, student or learning or behavior management. Better, cheaper, faster, smarter — those are the values that most folks in ed-tech like to tout. And yes, I'm sure plenty of teachers used Desmos that way. But that wasn't the intent of Eli or Dan or even necessarily the design of the instrument, the graphing calculator. Kids made art with Desmos; kids made art with math; and with the Desmos curriculum, kids deliberated with and about math, a learning practice that runs counter to this firmly-held belief we have that math, unlike other fields of knowledge, is merely about getting a right or wrong answer and that the best way to develop and wield mathematical knowledge in school is to fill out worksheets as quickly as possible. Desmos never bent its design or its trajectory, even in response to the most mundane usage, towards what are these common practices and pedagogies of ed-tech: "we can help students do their homework faster" or "we can help teachers automate their grading" or "check out our features that showcase some bullshit metrics that our investors like to see." Now that the company has been acquired, I don't have an answer when someone asks me that "gotcha" question. You got me: "Nope. There's not a goddamn thing." And that certainly means it's time for me to step away from ed-tech for good. I’ve already taken time away from this site to grieve the loss of my son. I’ve taken time away to write and promote my book. I’ve repeatedly told myself that I’m just tired from all of it — death, the pandemic, [gestures widely] etcetera — and that eventually my passion will return. But I don't think it's going to. It's time to move on to something else. I cannot, I will not be your Cassandra any more. This site won't go away — I'll still pay for the domain for a while longer, at least — but the HEWN newsletter, the Patreon, and all Hack Education-related social media will. You'll be able to find my latest writing on my personal website. Remember blogging? Yeah. I'll do that for a while until I can figure something else out. I have to put this decade-long project to rest so that I can move on to something that doesn't consume me in its awfulness and make me dwell in doom.

This is the transcript of the keynote I gave today at Digifest. (Well, I recorded it a couple of weeks ago, but it was broadcast today, and I popped in for some "live" Q&A afterwards, where I was asked the obligatory "do you hate all ed-tech" question. And here I was, trying to be all sweetness and light...) Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today. I'm happy to be here — and when I say "here," I do mean in my apartment, in sunny California. Personally, I'm not ready to travel yet, not remotely interested in getting back on an airplane — because let's be honest, air travel was already terrible. And I am pleased that, if nothing else good comes out of the pandemic, I can now do keynote talks in my bare feet and yoga pants. Those of you who are familiar with my work are likely a bit taken aback to see that the title of my talk today contains the word "Hope." After all, I have been called "Ed-Tech's Cassandra," and like the Trojan priestess, I am known for my proclamations and predictions of doom. As such, I am not viewed as a messenger with good news. My talks, I'm often told, are "depressing" and make folks want to leave the field. (From time-to-time, when I do hear about some high-profile tech entrepreneur who has decided to turn away from "disrupting education" towards building "flying taxis" or whatever, I do like to think I played some small part in their frustrated disillusionment.) The thing is, though, like Cassandra, I'm not wrong. I know that my work makes people feel uncomfortable, particularly when so much of the tech and ed-tech industry mantra rests on narratives promising a happy, shiny, better future. No one appreciates it when someone comes along and says "actually, if you wheel this giant horse — impressive as it looks — inside the gates, it'll destroy everything you love, everyone you care about. Don't do it." And like Cassandra, it's exhausting to keep repeating "don't do it," and to have folks go right on ahead and do it anyway. I've been writing about ed-tech for over a decade now, cautioning people about the repercussions of handing over data, infrastructure, ideology, investment to Silicon Valley types. And for what? And for what? Trust me, I've spent a lot of the last few years stewing on that question — particularly as I have watched the awfulness of pandemic education (and its digital components) unfold: what has my work done? What change, what difference have I made? For so many reasons, it's been hard not to sink into utter despair. I know many of us feel that way right now. I don't think I'm exaggerating or even doomsaying to state that things don't look good. The pandemic. Still. Global climate change. (I say I'm glad to be in sunny California but it's actually the rainy season, and it hasn't rained in over a month.) Poverty. War and impending war. Inflation. Rising economic inequality and precarity. Drug overdoses. Genocide. Nationalism. White supremacy. Neoliberalism. Violence. Mass incarceration. Fanaticism. Surveillance technologies. Disinvestment from the public sphere. Anti-science rhetoric. A rejection of education. A rejection of knowledge. "Things are," as Malcolm Harris wrote on a sign during the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zucotti Park back in 2011 (and as he titled his recent book) "fucked up and bullshit." We aren't in a good place right now — structurally or socially or individually or psychologically or physically. And it's hard to see how we're headed towards a good place either. Many of us are grieving; many of us are traumatized. Many of our students are grieving; many of our students are traumatized. Most, dare I say. All of us, even. Deeply and profoundly so. To ignore this, to minimize this, to pretend as though "back to normal" can or even should happen is injurious. To prescribe a piece of technology as some sort of solution or fix to any of this is insulting. To give a keynote full of sanitized sunshine is just gross. And yet, we cannot not respond to trauma. We cannot not address what we have been through with the pandemic specifically and with — sweeping hand gesture — everything else. Denial won't work. But the worst response, perhaps, is to forget (arguably a form of denial, but one that happens at a social not just on a psychological level). And that's what many powerful forces want — it's what they always want. Because forgetting isn't just about sliding into complacency. Forgetting also leads to despair — and this is crucial to my argument today — and broadly speaking, this is why (I tell myself at least) my work matters. Contrary to those who dismiss my work as a critic as negative or destructive, criticism is generative; it can be one of many (small) acts of hope — criticism grounded in historical analysis is the antithesis of a numbing forgetfulness or an invented nostalgia. One of the things I have written about quite a bit is the idea of an "ed-tech amnesia" — that is, there is a certain inattention to and erasure of the history of the field of education technology. And I don’t just mean forgetting or erasing what happened in the 1950s or 1980s (although I wrote a book on that). I mean forgetting what happened five, ten years ago — it's been ten years, incidentally, since Occupy Wall Street, and I fear we've forgotten that great push to hold the rich and the banks and the venture capitalists accountable. I specifically mean forgetting what happened during the last few years, during the pandemic. Ed-tech amnesia. Some of this is a result of an influx of Silicon Valley types in recent years — people with no ties to education or education technology who think that their ignorance and lack of expertise is a strength. (I use that phrase "Silicon Valley" less as a geographic marker than an ideological one.) And it doesn't help, of course, that there is, in general, a repudiation of history within the Silicon Valley framework itself. The tech industry's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago, an interview with an Uber engineer who'd pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," he told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (I could tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.) There are other examples of this historical amnesia in ed-tech specifically, no doubt. Narratives about the “factory model of education." Stories that education hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Tall tales about the invention of the MOOC. I want us to be vigilant about this amnesia because it has political implications. In the coming months and years, many people will want us to forget their mistakes; they will try to rehabilitate not just their bad ideas but their very reputations. By "many people," of course, I mean Ivanka Trump. Maybe Prince Charles. But I also mean any number of people in education and education technology, who've not only screwed up the tools and practices of teaching and learning over the past year or so, but who have a rather long history of bad if not dangerous ideas and decisions. These are people who have done real, substantive damage to students, to teachers, to public education. Again and again. We cannot forget this. I worry we already have, of course. If we forget, we cannot hold the perpetrators accountable for this damage. If we forget, we cannot see the ways in which we have been strong, resilient, even defiant in the face of it all. "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote. Rebecca Solnit cites him in her book Hope in the Dark, originally published in April 2004, at the start of the second term of President George W. Bush (speaking of people whose reputations have been rehabilitated), right as many of us despaired that his incompetence had led us to war, as well as to an expansion of governmental power and surveillance. "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." "It’s an extraordinary statement," Solnit writes, "one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope." "Amnesia leads to despair in many ways," she continues. "The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change." The future is not pre-ordained. Yes, these are terrible times. Yes, the path forward seems incredibly challenging for those of us who believe in education, particularly public education, and who believe that education can be re-oriented away from exploitation and domination and towards justice. Contrary to the popular story, there is no inevitability of a technological future of education. There's no inevitability to "online." There's not, despite how loudly ed-tech evangelists insist that "There's no going back now," so pleased that disaster capitalism has helped unlock the possibility they've longed for: one in which all teaching and learning is mediated through their digital platforms, in which labor unions are busted, in which public funding is eviscerated to make way for privatized profiteering. Of course, there is no "back." Time doesn't work that way. And no one wants to go "back." That's a red herring, akin to thinking "luddite" is an insult. The luddites didn't want to go back; they wanted the future to be better. From where we are, there is always only forward. But the future is unwritten. Forward is open and incumbent upon us to shape. "The best way to predict the future is to build it," computer scientist Alan Kay famously said. But computer scientists should not be alone in that building. (God forbid.) I've long argued that the best way to predict the future is to issue a press release. Or the best way to predict the future is to complain about something in your weekly op-ed in The New York Times. By this, I mean that it's not always so much the building as it is the storytelling that sways the direction the future flows. Again, that's why stories of the past matter as much as do stories of the future — even when (and especially when) predicting the future. One of my favorite science fiction authors, Octavia Butler, was once asked about this: 'So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?' a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. 'I didn’t make up the problems,' I pointed out. 'All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.' 'Okay,' the young man challenged. 'So what’s the answer?' 'There isn’t one,' I told him. 'No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?' He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke. 'No,' I said. 'I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.' You can be one of the answers if you choose to be. "Writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future," Butler said. "But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet." Too many people who try to predict the future of education and education technology have not bothered to learn the alphabet — the grammar of schooling, to borrow a phrase from education historian Larry Cuban. That grammar includes the beliefs and practices and memory of schooling — our collective memory, not just our own personal experiences of school. That collective memory — that's history. When I wrote my book Teaching Machines, I wanted to chronicle a longer history of ed-tech than the story that often gets told — a history that, strangely enough when you think about it, often begins and ends with the computer. Through this framework, computers — "the digital" — are teleological. And those who question technology are therefore aberrant because technology is all there ever was, is, or will be. I wanted to show in my book that many of the ideas that get bandied about today as innovative or (god forbid) revolutionary have a long history. Educational psychologists, for example, have been building technologies to "personalize education" for over a century. To recognize this is to see the legacy of their work in our objects and in our practices today; it is to understand that if these objects were constructed they can be challenged and dismantled. They are not natural. They are not inevitable. And it is to know too that there has always been resistance and refusal — successful resistance and refusal — to the vision of an automated education. There has always been change — and that change has come from the popular power of students and teachers, not just the financial and political power of businessmen, always so desperate to center themselves in our stories of "transformation." We have always been strong. We have had to be resilient. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," as Rage Against the Machine sang in their 1999 song "Testify." OK, actually it's a quote from George Orwell's 1984, but hey. To control the past, we have to know our history. "The stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do," Rebecca Solnit argues. And we can change the future. We have before. Never forget that. As my other favorite science fiction author Ursula Le Guin said, "any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." And we must resist and we much change. We must believe we can. We must have hope. A few years ago, I listened to a speaker who was quite critical — in passing, mind you — of hope. And she wasn't alone. There was so much energy channeled into that word when it became the slogan of a young Senator from Illinois and his starry-eyed Presidential campaign. After 8 years of Barack Obama in office and so many unfulfilled promises, so much disappointment (and of course the rise of a violent white nationalism in response) many people have lost hope. They've lost faith in hope. They're utterly disillusioned by it. That speaker said that "you cannot counter structural inequality with good will." And I immediately thought of Antonio Gramsci, as one does. One of the greatest Marxist thinkers of the 20th century, Gramsci is best known for writing some 3000 pages of history during his imprisonment by the Fascist Italian government from 1927 until his death ten years later at age 46. Gramsci famously said "I am a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of will." Will, according to Gramsci, is part of a revolutionary praxis. It recognizes the social structure, and it helps us to move deliberately from thinking about to acting for radical change. Will is, for Gramsci, political and intellectual. Will is a strategy, or part of a strategy of struggle. Will is bound of in the politics of hope. Hope is bound up in the politics of will. You all came to this event because, I'd wager, of will. Good will. Willpower. A will to change your own pedagogical practices. A will to change your institutions. Will is necessary, politically. I hope that you will consider how to tie that will to action, to collective action. You are not alone. I believe that you came to education too because you believe in the future. You must to work in this field. Educators engage in the profound process and practice of engaging minds in change — intellectual transformation. Education straddles the past — "the curriculum" — and the future — individually and societally. Education is about what we learn today so we can be better tomorrow. Education is a practice of hope. You cannot be indifferent about the future and be an educator. Another passage from Gramsci (who I put alongside Paolo Freire, Franz Fanon, bell hooks as one of the most important thinkers in education who's rarely recognized as such), from a 1917 letter "Indifferenti": I hate the indifferent. I believe that life means taking sides. One who is really alive, can be nothing if not citizen and partisan. Indifference is lethargy: it is parasitism, not life. Therefore, I hate the indifferent. Indifference is the dead weight of history. Indifference plays an important role in history. It plays a passive role, but it does play a role. It is fatality; it is something that cannot be counted on; it is something that disrupts programmes, overturns the best made plans; it is that awful something that chokes intelligence. What happens, the evil that touches everyone, happens because the majority relinquish their will to it, allowing the enactment of laws that only a revolution can revoke, letting men rise to power who, later, only a mutiny can remove. ... I am "partigiano", alive, and already I hear, in the consciences of those on my same side, the throbbing bustle of the city of the future that we are building. And in it, the social chain does not weigh on the shoulders of only a few .... There is no-one watching from the sidelines while others are sacrificed, bled dry. I am alive, partisan. And, therefore, I hate those who do not take sides; I hate the indifferent. Memory counteracts indifference. Memory counteracts despair. Memory creates the space for hope. Memory reminds us: change is possible. It urges us: change is necessary. It will not be easy. It never is. Even having hope can be hard, let alone making change. "Hope is a discipline," prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us. It is not an emotion. It is not even as Gramsci put it simply "optimism" — a belief that things will get better. Hope is work. You have to put energy and time into it. You have to practice, repeatedly. You have to keep at it, keep moving, keep pushing. No one else will free you or fix you — except us, collectively through our power to imagine and build a better future. Hope is not in technology. Hope is in our humanity. A better future for all of us, for all living creatures on this planet does not look like an app or a platform or a gadget. It does not look like an institution founded hundreds of years ago, desperate to cling to old hierarchies. It does not look like an institution founded more recently, desperate to re-inscribe new hierarchies. Join me in refusing the old world, and in refusing the future envisioned by the techno-elite. Our refusals can be small. Our actions might seem insignificant. But do not despair. We aren't alone in this — resistance is part of our legacy. We can make it our future. We can hope.

I'd wager it's the most frequently told story about ed-tech — one told with more gusto and more frequency even than "computers will revolutionize teaching" and "you can learn anything on YouTube." Indeed, someone invoked this story just the other day when chatting with me about the current shape and status of our education system: the school bell was implemented to acclimate students for life as factory workers, to train them to move and respond on command, their day broken into segments of time dictated by the machine rather than the rhythms of pre-industrial, rural life. It's a story that seems plausible. The bell is a technology associated with behavioral conditioning, after all — Pavlov and his salivating dogs. It is a technology that organizes the school, controlling both space and time. The bell sounds out the logic of the day: it's time for math. It's time for recess. It's time for reading. Finally, thank god, around 3 o'clock or so, it's time to go home. And at the end of the school year, when "schools out completely," as Alice Cooper sings, the children cheer with joy as the final bell rings, the bell and their voices warping as the classic song fades out — freed from, as John Taylor Gatto put it, "the barren experiences of school bells in a prison of measured time." (1) It should come as no surprise to close observers of invented histories of education that Gatto would have something to say (in almost all his books, in fact) about the tyranny of the bell. He was, after all, one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative: that the origins of mass schooling are inextricably bound to the need to reshape a rebellious farming nation's sons and daughters into a docile, industrial workforce. It's a powerful, influential story, sure, but it's a pretty inaccurate history. The bell also invokes another popular tale, often repeated by the same folks: the one in which schools haven't changed in hundreds of years. Some metal contraption still bangs in the hallways while the rest of the world has moved on to — gesturing widely — the digital. Need proof? Why, one can point to the fact that Alice Cooper's 1972 hit remains a popular, end-of-the-school-year anthem (as does "Another Brick in the Wall" which was also produced by Bob Erin who urged Pink Floyd to add a children's chorus as it was so successful in the Alice Cooper track. But I digress.) Surely this demonstrates how despicably moribund schools are, right? Or at least, it shows how much we like stories about education that feel true — or maybe songs about education that make us feel like anti-establishment rebels. Many institutions — not only schools and not only factories — have long used bells to mark beginnings and endings and important events. One can hardly point to the development of the mechanical clock and its connection to the strict observance of prayer times at monasteries and view the bell as a technology of liberation, no doubt. But one can perhaps reconsider citing John Taylor Gatto as your sole source of education history. (The guy called the people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson his "employees," for crying out loud.) Bells, primarily handbells, have been a technology of school since their outset, well before "the factory" they were purportedly modeled on. They were used, as were the bells in churches, to summon students to ye old one room schoolhouse for the beginning of the day. Architecture and Ed-Tech The Common School movement that nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann spearheaded (from roughly 1840-1880), advocating for the foundation of a public school system, did not just promote a common curriculum — an overt curriculum, that is, of reading, writing, and arithmetic or a covert curriculum of punctuality and obedience. It also advocated for the construction of standardized school buildings, replacing the one-room schoolhouses in urban areas. (It's worth noting that, even into the 1910s, half of the students in the US remained enrolled in the country's 212,000 one-room schools.) (2) Mann recommended that communities invest in a bell for these buildings. "Where the expense can be afforded, every schoolhouse should be provided with a bell. If not the only mode, it is probably the best one for insuring punctuality; and the importance of punctuality can hardly be overstated." (3) The architecture of the school building informs the pedagogy that takes place therein — the same goes for the technologies that are implemented inside them. And that includes the school bell. But bells weren't simply — or even primarily — a technology of pedagogy as much as one for announcements and alarms. Although companies like the Standard Electric Time Company (founded in Massachusetts in 1884) sold synchronized clock and bell systems to schools (and yes, factories), an early function of the latter was not to mimic the rhythm of the workplace but rather to warn occupants about fire. (Insurance Engineering issued a widely-cited report in 1913, decrying the condition of some 250,000 schools in the US as "built to burn." "In 1911," the Moline, Illinois Dispatch worriedly detailed, "the value of school and college buildings destroyed by fire approximated $3,000,000. Estimates of the frequency of fires are as high as ten a week."(4) The story, incidentally, blames the introduction of a new piece of ed-tech for many of the blazes: the film projector.) Bells and Platoons The ringing of the bell to signal the beginning and end of a class period, rather than just the beginning and end of the school day is often traced to William Wirt, who became superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908. Wirt, a student of progressive educator John Dewey, devised a system in which, when the bell rang, students would move from room to room for instruction, not only in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in music and shop, as well as time outdoors on a playground. Generally, children had two ninety-minute periods or three hours a day in the basic subjects, and six thirty minute periods in special subjects the other three hours of the school day. Obviously to function effectively this scheme required a high degree of administrative planning and precision timing in the moving of children. This was particularly true if the schools were large, as they were at Gary, where some of them included all twelve grades and eventually had as many as 3,000 students." (5) Wirt called this the "work-study-play school," and Dewey praised the model in his 1915 book (co-written with daughter Evelyn) Schools of Tomorrow: The question [Wirt] tried to answer was this: What did the Gary children need to make them good citizens and happy and prosperous human beings, and how could the money available for educational purposes supply all these needs? The industrial features of his schools will be taken up later, but it may be well to point out in passing that they were not instituted to turn out good workers for the steel company, nor to save the factories the expense of training their own workers, but for the educational value of the work they involved. In the same way it would be a mistake to consider the Gary schools simply as an attempt to take the unpromising immi- grant child and turn him into a self-supporting immigrant, or as an attempt to meet the demand of an industrial class for a certain sort of training. (6) That John Dewey insisted what became known as the Gary Plan wasn't designed to condition students to become factory workers should maybe count for something. Maybe? It doesn't mean, of course, that the system didn't have incredible appeal to those reformers in the early twentieth century who were determined to reshape public education into a more efficient endeavor. Indeed as Callahan argues in his classic Education and the Cult of Efficiency, the Gary Plan was often showcased as an example of scientific management applied to schooling. But note: this was not because it trained children as workers but because it enabled a more efficient usage of the school building. That schools were empty at nights and on weekends and certain classrooms unused during the day was such a waste of money to those reformers, who argued that schools needed to be run more like businesses, indeed more like factories. ("Keep the students in the buildings year round, dammit!") While this push for reform was largely administrative — a financial endeavor — there were concerns among parents and educators at the time that this system would have pedagogical, if not broader cultural implications. In a 1924 article in the New Republic titled "The Factory System," Chicago teacher Margaret Haley decried the Gary Plan, also known as the "platoon school." (School bells as a technology training students for the military — that's a Douglas Noble argument right there.) Clearly, she argued, the Gary Plan was simply an effort to lower the cost of education by enrolling more students than classrooms could hold, "dumping" the excess onto the playground or into auditorium or cafeteria spaces, and rotating them rapidly through classrooms so that, as a result, teachers would have hundreds of pupils per day. The platoon school was "the factory system carried into the public school, which needs only the closing-time whistle to make complete its identification with the great industrial plants!" (7) Although the "platoon school" fell out of favor after 1930, with teachers and even some administrators decrying the Taylorization of education, the influence of efficiency-based reforms remained. Moreover, the adoption of the Carnegie Unit and the standardization of curricular requirements and teachers' workloads in the early twentieth century ha led to the adoption of a school schedule that appears, at least in some way, platoon-school-like: the day divided into 45-minute class periods. This is a Public Service Announcement But by and large, through much of the twentieth century, schools did not ring bells to move students from class to class, from room to room. Automated school bells, along with public announcement systems, were available but were not widely adopted until after World War II. Indeed, it was well into the 1960s that many schools finally wired every classroom up to an automated PA system so that the bell, rather than the teacher with an eye on the clock, dismissed class. (And in many communities, it was the PTA that led the fundraising for this bell equipment. You know the PTA, that bastion of bourgeois values so very committed to their children being trained by bells to become factory workers.) (8) That the ringing of the school bell was not part of some original and sinister strategy to habituate students for a life of labor doesn't mean the bell — like all technologies in or out of schools — didn't come with and be born from certain ideologies. But the school bell has a different, more complicated history than the "factory model schools" story tells it. It's worth understanding that history because to do so helps us understand the present and design the future. Schools haven't always or everywhere been modeled on factories, despite the efforts of business-minded reformers (still) to reshape them to that end for over a century. The bell hasn't always symbolized drudgery, and when it did signal compliance — and to be sure, it did — we need to think about what that expectation meant historically, not just rhetorically as we describe or decry education today. And don't even get me started on the phrase I've heard in some ed-tech circles, "cells and bells." The history of education technology — and my rationale for writing this series of essays on the topic — should help us see the possibility for alternatives. Those who want us to forget (or mis-remember) the past are very much committed to our give up hope. Things weren't always this way; resistance is possible. That's all there's ever been, in fact — change — even with something as seemingly old and unchanging as the school bell. (1) John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, 2009. p. 130. (2) Jeffrey Lackney, "New Approaches for School Design." The Sage Handbook of Educational Leadership, 2011. p. 356. (3) Horace Mann, "Supplementary Report on the Subject of Schoolhouses." (1838). Life and Works of Horace Mann, 1891. p. 486. (4) "Local Schools in List of Dangerous." The Dispatch, Moline, Illinois, 16 April 1913. (5) Raymond Callahan. Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 1962. p. 129. (6) John and Evelyn Dewey. Schools of Tomorrow, 1915. p. 176. (7) Callahan, p. 146. (8) Archie, February 17, 1960.

Hack Education, as perhaps you've noticed, has been on hiatus for a while. What with the pandemic, the death of my son, and the publication of Teaching Machines, I really couldn't continue to pay attention to the day-to-day nonsense of ed-tech. (The book, in fairness, did have me focused on some of the mid-20th century nonsense.) And after taking a long break from "current events," I am not quite sure I'm ready to face any of it again. But I suppose I must. There is no safety net for freelance writers and independent scholars; no bereavement leave; no institutional support to help me get through tough times. I need to get back to work — that is, I need to start earning some money again. I have toyed with the idea of leaving the field altogether, letting this website go dormant permanently. I thought about looking for a job here in the Bay Area where I could pretend to be an instructional technologist or project manager or something along those lines. But I'm not sure who'd hire me. Thanks to an invitation to speak to the UN — part of a research project on ed-tech and the privatization of school — I was reminded that it'd be an uphill battle to launch a brand new career in a different or even adjacent field — particularly at my age, particularly if I want to be recognized as a global expert. But then again, do I? Expertise is kinda weird these days. I know that — whatever I do — it has to involve some political bent, some fight for a better future for everyone. And while my work for the past couple of decades has been on education and technology as the means/obstacle to justice, I'm not sure that's a fight I care to engage in. The past year-plus — "pandemic schooling" — has demonstrated how much of what I've said and done and written about has been pretty fucking pointless: the bullshit goes on. Indeed, in the chaos, folks have doubled-down on the very worst aspects of ed-tech, peddling the horrors of surveillance and control as yet education salvation. Even though I haven't really been on social media for the past year, even though I haven't seen a single headline or read a single RSS feed about ed-tech, I bet I can tell you exactly what happened in 2021. I bet all the issues are the same as I've covered in my Year in Review essays in the past: surveillance, behaviorism, white saviorism, exploitation, extraction, control. I can't keep throwing myself at the machine to the detriment of my well-being — mentally, physically, financially. It's time to do something a little different. Rather than focusing my attention on the day-to-day ridiculousness of ed-tech, I'm going to continue to write essays on the history of ed-tech. I believe that these can help illuminate why schools and ed-tech take the shape they do today. Despite my passionate indifference to ed-tech as an industry, I do remain fascinated by the stories that we tell about the history of the future of education and how these narratives are often invented and wielded by those peddling educational reforms. The first essay, coming later this month, will be about one of the key technologies invoked this way: the school bell. I also plan to start writing about some of the (histories of) technologies of health and "wellness." There's an important overlap here with ed-tech — not just due to the heavy reliance on pseudoscience. Much as, in the last few years, education reformers and entrepreneurs have sought to promote "social emotional learning" as a new avenue for kids' well-being — or rather, data collection and compliance — technologists and investors promote "wellness" for workers, parents, and citizens alike. These non-ed-tech essays will appear on my personal website. All of my writing will go out on the HEWN newsletter — no longer the Hack Education Weekly Newsletter, but rather a monthly one. HEWN will continue to be free, but you can support my work via Patreon (or PayPal or Venmo) — or, you can hire me to speak to your class, conference, etc. I'll even talk about ed-tech, if that's what you really, really, really want. And pigeons. There will, of course, still be pigeons.

It's here!