"Technology will eventually destroy the way schools are run now"
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“Destroy” is a deliberate provocation: it refuses the comforting fantasy that schools will merely “innovate” their way into the future. Greenberg, speaking as an educator, is pointing at governance more than gadgets. The target isn’t the chalkboard; it’s the operating system of schooling: age-batched classrooms, bell schedules, seat time as a proxy for learning, credentialing as a sorting mechanism. Technology, in this framing, isn’t an add-on. It’s an accelerant that makes the current model look increasingly like an artifact of industrial-era logistics.
The subtext is a warning to institutions that treat tech as a set of tools rather than a force that reroutes power. Once instruction can be accessed anywhere, anytime, the school’s monopoly on content delivery collapses. Families start behaving like consumers; students assemble learning from platforms, tutors, communities, and credentials that travel outside district boundaries. The pressure then moves to what schools uniquely provide: relationships, structure, care, socialization, and legitimacy. If schools can’t articulate that value beyond “we cover the curriculum,” technology doesn’t just improve them; it competes with them.
Context matters: this is the language of someone who has watched reform cycles arrive with glossy promises and leave the basic machinery untouched. Greenberg’s “eventually” signals inevitability, but also procrastination: administrators can delay the reckoning with policy, labor, assessment, and equity, but they can’t dodge it. The unsettling implication is that disruption won’t be evenly distributed. Technology may “destroy” the old system, yet without intentional design, it can just as easily rebuild stratification in sleeker interfaces.
The subtext is a warning to institutions that treat tech as a set of tools rather than a force that reroutes power. Once instruction can be accessed anywhere, anytime, the school’s monopoly on content delivery collapses. Families start behaving like consumers; students assemble learning from platforms, tutors, communities, and credentials that travel outside district boundaries. The pressure then moves to what schools uniquely provide: relationships, structure, care, socialization, and legitimacy. If schools can’t articulate that value beyond “we cover the curriculum,” technology doesn’t just improve them; it competes with them.
Context matters: this is the language of someone who has watched reform cycles arrive with glossy promises and leave the basic machinery untouched. Greenberg’s “eventually” signals inevitability, but also procrastination: administrators can delay the reckoning with policy, labor, assessment, and equity, but they can’t dodge it. The unsettling implication is that disruption won’t be evenly distributed. Technology may “destroy” the old system, yet without intentional design, it can just as easily rebuild stratification in sleeker interfaces.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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