This ouroboros sacrifices teachers

on an altar made of cash

Engagement. Innovation. Data-driven. Collaboration. Fidelity. Community of Practice. If you are a teacher who has attended an education conference anytime recently, you recognize these tiresome buzzwords. You are weary of them. I would bet that if we analyzed the titles of all sessions at any educational conference in the last five years, three quarters would contain at least one of these words or a handful of others. Little is more off-putting than, say, a keynote speech full of lingo like this embedded into platitudes about education spouted by someone who hasn’t been a classroom teacher in years. It comes off as a bunch of canned language presented to educators who try their best to be authentic every day. What a mismatch.

Anyway, something that is more off-putting, and not unrelated to the jargon above, is the infiltration of capitalism into the field of education. For a profession that is about the pure desire to help raise up young people with skills and knowledge, and character and coping skills, and confidence and all that, to be beset by salespeople at every turn, trying to ply some product that nobody needs using empty jargon to sell it, is discouraging, at best. This happens mostly at conferences. Attending an educational conference isn’t always,¹ but can be, an effort at staving off these snake-oil-mongers. First, though, you have to know who they are.

Let’s start with vendors. The Latin etymology makes it simple. Vendere means to sell. I am not naïve enough to think a large conference can be produced easily without vendors. They hold down the exhibit hall, sponsor receptions served by beleaguered caterers, provide swag, buy ads, and more. They interact with the conference-goers, if only to hand out candy or perhaps stacks of logoed sticky-notes. I am not immune to these, myself; who doesn’t want a mini-Twix bar at 4pm, or a rad new gel pen for the teacher bag? And some vendors are actually former teachers and are much easier to relate to, right off the bat. There is something fundamentally different between talking to a vendor who’s a born salesperson and talking to a vendor who’s a born teacher. 

This difference becomes especially noticeable when vendors are allowed to become session presenters. A session at a conference I recently attended boasted a title that was, in its entirety, a Brené Brown quote: “Vulnerability is the only bridge to build connection.” I sat in the room because my session followed it; I was stunned to see that all 100+ chairs were filled (almost exclusively by White women, it turns out). The fifteen-minute talk was about “student engagement,” and consisted of about 12 slides on the topic of “student engagement” with zero specifics or suggestions, yet included many platitudes about “student engagement” and two (!) more Brené Brown quotes which propped up the audience through the final slide. At the end, “stop by our vendor booth if you want to find out more!” Then everybody left except 10 people who stayed to hear my talk. White ladies love their Brené!

Actual email I received in my LinkedIn message thingy. There’s so much jargon! What could it mean? Is it even about education?

So, this is what it comes to: people pay money to attend conferences which are largely supported by vendors and whose session schedules are also partially populated by vendors. You can’t always tell, either, who on the schedule is a vendor and who is an educator. So you show up for some Brené or whatever and you end up with an empty pitch and an invitation to visit a sales booth. It’s disheartening and, in the end, harmful.

I don’t blame the vendor humans themselves. They are just people, doing what they do. They might not even be happy with their role, or their choices, and perhaps they simply haven’t been able to lever themselves out of it yet. And I don’t blame the conferences. They can be worth the money, and certainly worth the time if you meet good people. It’s the system that makes me sick, the whole education-industrial complex.²

This here is an ouroboros. It could be a symbol of infinity but I’m choosing to see it as a destructive force.

The second anyone thinks they can profit off the people being “served” and this is allowed through legislation, deregulation, or whatever mechanism, that’s when exploitation begins. Look at another other social service industry that has been corrupted by capitalism: health care. Here's how this corruption plays out in real life. Undergoing recovery from an injury or surgery, you spot five $80 mesh bandages on your EOB.³ You find a $9000 “home health visit” charge from a nurse who “didn’t think anyone looked at their bill.”⁴ Your hearing aids could cost $3200 because insurance executives don't think they count as necessary medical devices.⁵ Health care thus becomes inaccessible to regular people and is also no longer supported by regular people doing the work for the work’s sake; it is run by people looking to make their dollars, leading to a cannibalistic, soul-killing industry, even while well-meaning health care workers still show up and do the thing.  

These mesh bandage sleeves cost $7 in your nearest drug store. When they appeared on my medical bill, they cost $80 each.

Winona LaDuke speaks of the Wendigo Economy, referring to cannibalistic monsters that devour resources while continually growing larger. Her theory describes devastating land destruction practiced in particular by expanding world economies, but it could also be applied to the way capitalism has infected sectors like health and education. From a summary of a keynote she delivered on this topic:

These industries not only have polluted the world and caused staggering inequality, but have also caused societies to become irresponsible and arrogant. 

Isn’t this the required logical outcome of capitalism? Bottomless and soulless. Where in this cycle is there space for actual humanity, a space isn’t tainted by selling, buying, money-making, and the rest of it? It reminds me of the book Feed by MT Anderson. Y’all, this 2012 sci-fi novel is a ruthless takedown of capitalism+AI and I fucking dare you to read it. But the point is, there’s no escaping this cycle once it begins, because people’s desire to make money becomes an endless grind of profiteering, as symbolized by the ouroboros.

It’s too late to go back now. The education-industrial complex is in process. All we can do is try to protect our students and our teachers from insidious purchased content, specifically curricula, software and hardware encased in hard-plastic jargon. Because let’s be clear that this is not how we want education to be: wasteful, artificial, and indifferent on the altar of someone’s bank balance.

1. Important note: I meet really fantastic people at educational conferences. A recent conference I attended allowed me to connect with some educators doing inspirational things and committed to staying in touch with others. Conferences are great, until they’re not.

2. To be totally transparent, I have an LLC that provides professional development to schools, helping teachers to improve their work with kids. I hire teachers to provide the PD. So yeah, I’m also a kind of vendor. And it’s a little bit gross, except that what I provide is something teachers do need, and I’m paying other teachers to do the work. There’s me justifying my own participation in this capitalist grossness even while I decry it in this newsletter.

3. Actual thing that happened to me.

4. Actual thing that happened to my friends.

5. Okay, I have great insurance and it did pay for some of this. But the $1700 I had to fork over via a line of credit was not applied to my deductible or out-of-pocket amount because the provider - the only one who sells these specific devices for single-sided hearing loss in my city - is “out of network.”