I enjoyed reading this week Neil Kraus’s The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (2023). The book’s core claim is that corporations and elites who subscribe to neoliberal tenets have promoted a narrative that has succeeded in becoming the conventional framework for addressing education reform. This framework he calls the “fantasy economy,” one in which there are abundant jobs but not sufficiently skilled and technologically educated graduates to fill them, as opposed to the real economy in which there is wage stagnation and rife underemployment. According to Kraus, “The fantasy economy's framing of economic inequality… focuses exclusively on education and intentionally deflects attention away from decades of public policies and changing business practices that have directly and indirectly contributed to stagnating wages for most while simultaneously producing extraordinary income and wealth gains for a small minority.” In short, corporate interests and the foundations that business elites have established to disseminate their ideology have promoted education reform as the solution to economic problems and inequality (which are not within the power of educational institutions to solve).
One thing came to mind as I was reading his book, and it’s the idea of sympathetic magic.
[Let’s leave The Golden Bough out of this if for no reason other than that I’ve never actually read it, but my second-hand knowledge of it is that as a work of 19th-century anthropology it’s full of the standard Victorian pretenses to rationalism that were part and parcel of the colonialist nous. I’m just thinking of sympathetic magic as a concept with a more common, colloquial currency, the belief that like causes like and, similarly, the remedy to an ailment resembles that ailment. If anyone has a better term for what this characterizes, let’s go for that. Woo-woo? Maybe that’s all this is. Tech woo-woo.]
For the last forty years we have been told that there is a high-tech global economy out there just pumping out new and exciting jobs, which American students simply cannot get because of failing secondary schools and a weak system of higher education. This claim is fallacious, those jobs are not there; instead we have underemployment and wage stagnation. Nevertheless, the solution proposed is always to introduce more technology into classrooms, to optimize, digitize, and technologize what we as educators do and the materials from which students learn. Despite the absolute failure of technology to have any positive impact on either educational or jobs outcomes, this has been the unchanging refrain for years.
Teaching with more digital tools does not exciting jobs in a high-tech global economy make. Nor would it do anything to prepare students for those jobs were they there. The most comical thing about promoting “tech readiness” among students is that it’s a legacy line from c1995 when it actually did take about half a day to get your Gateway 2000 up and running. It’s 2025, a caterpillar can figure out how to use apps.
Suggesting that there’s an app for education is not “innovation.”
It’s just sympathetic magic.
Tech woo-woo.