‘Collective Amnesia’ of Schools’ Romance with Big Tech
In her new book, Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, Natasha Singer, a veteran business reporter for The New York Times, traces Big Tech’s bid to persuade schools to embrace their products, with industry-sponsored curricula and tools growing at astonishing speed. She also introduces readers to a group of educators and researchers fighting for a broader vision of computer science that looks beyond commercial digital tools.
A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley’s campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma’s influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.
Cover of Natasha Singer’s new book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools
“Never has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,” she writes.
As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students “only half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.”
In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple’s programming language for building iPhone apps. It’s as if schools embraced a “Raytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,” she writes.
