Mitchell Stevens
(Stanford), co-sponsored by the School of Education and COR.

Monday, October 7, 12:00-1:00pm
Education 2010

Mitchell Stevens
Stanford, School of Education
Director, Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR)
https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/stevens4

Talk Title: Education without States

Abstract:  Virtually all of what social scientists know about education is
built on the presumption that education is a right guaranteed, if not
necessarily provided, by governments.  Throughout the twentieth century
most educational data were produced and analyzed with government
patronage, with the resulting knowledge deployed to nurture modern
citizens and build modern states.  Very recently, proprietary firms are
producing huge new stores of education data through digitally mediated
instruction.  They also are underwriting scientific inquiry with these
data in the interest of improving privately owned educational products and
services. This represents a major change in the ecology of educational
knowledge production that has been largely overlooked by observers of the
digital revolution in education.  I provide a synthetic description of
this change and specify its implications for education science,
governments, education businesses, and citizenship in the twenty-first
century.