The Alienation of Fact

Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers

Kenneth J. Saltman

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780262371742
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Data Processing

Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and competing visions for the future of education that lie at the center of the problem.

Schools are increasingly reimagined as businesses, and high-stakes standardized testing and curricula, for-profit charter schools, and the rise of educational AI put capital and technology at the center of education. Yet even as our society demands measure, data, and facts, politicians and news outlets regularly make unfounded assertions. How should we make sense of the contradictions between the demand for radical data-driven empiricism and the flight from evidence, argument, or theoretical justification?

In this critical investigation of the new digital directions of educational privatization—AI education, adaptive learning technology, biometrics, the quantification of play and social emotional learning—and the politics of the body, Saltman shows how the false certainty of bodies and numbers replaces deliberative and thoughtful agency in a time of increasing precarity. A distinctive contribution to scholarship on public school privatization and educational technology, politics, policy, pedagogy, and theory, The Alienation of Fact is a spirited call for democratic education that values creating a society of "thinking people" over capitalistic gains.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Alienation of Fact: Antitheory, Positivism, and Critical Pedagogy
• 2. Artificial Intelligence and Digital Educational Privatization
• 3. New Directions of Global Educational Privatization: Digital Technology, Social and Emotional Learning, and the Quantification of Affect
• 4. The Lego Foundation and the Quantification of Play
• 5. Conspiracy Against Theory: The Educational Conditions for Rampant Conspiracy Theories
• 6. Trust in Numbers, Distrust of Experts: Education, New Technology, and the Paranoid Politics of Disinterested Objectivity
• 7. “Privilege Checking,” “Virtue Signaling,” “Affinity Groups,” and “Safe Spaces”: What Happens When Cultural Politics is Privatized and the Body Replaces Argument
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index