The ‘Entrepreneur:’ Educating Americans for the Digital Age

How are digital technologies and the internet changing the values of the American public education system, the core institution for the production of the modern citizen? Kouross Esmaeli will discuss his research in the New York City public school ecosystem, and the relationship between the increasing digitization and privatization of public education. Search engines are replacing library research, digitized textbooks arrive on Apple iPads, Google Classroom becomes a basic tool of communication between students and teachers, and private testing companies gather and own psychometric ‘big data’ on individual students. For-profit technology in the classroom is transforming the educational process: quantitative data is replacing teacher-subjective judgment, testing is becoming the dominant form of assessment, and schools are producing consumers and entrepreneurs instead of citizens, as the values of tech companies--self-monitoring, risk-taking, and uncritical optimism--become dominant in the classroom. These values saturate the educational space, encouraging a form of 'entrepreneurialism' that serves this confluence of technology and the profit motive. The ‘entrepreneur’ becomes the ideal final product of public education and continues the legacy of other cultural heroic figures in earlier periods of the development of American society: the ‘pioneer,’ the ‘settler,’ the ‘cowboy,’ and the ‘rags-to-riches tycoon.’