For most of America’s 10 million middle schoolers, English class means enjoying—or, perhaps, enduring—the timeless narratives of the Western canon: Fahrenheit 451, Black Boy, The Giver, Parable of the Sower, 1984. Teachers order these books every year, and school librarians stock up for fall classes. It’s a cash cow for book publishers and distributors—and they intend to keep it that way.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have discreetly and methodically tightened their grip on American schools, and the pandemic has given them license to squeeze even tighter. By 2017, tens of millions of students were already using Google Chromebooks and apps for reading, writing, and turning in their work. Google Classroom now has more than 100 million users worldwide—nearly seven times the number reported in The New York Times three years ago. When we emerge from the pandemic, schools will be even more reliant on such systems. Industry is bolting an adamantine layer of technology onto the world’s classrooms, in what amounts to a stealth form of privatization.
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