The Datafied School in the Neoliberal Era: Pandemic Shifts in South Korean Education Policy

Abstract

COVID-19 was a critical juncture for education. Powerful tech corporations seized the opportunity to “blitzscale” (Hoffman & Yeh, 2018) data-driven education technologies and push business-friendly policies and infrastructure (Williamson, 2021). Focusing on the case of South Korea, I argue that its pandemic-era policies on “AI textbooks” conflict with public values of education and worked to (1) frame education primarily as an optimization of human capital enhancement for state modernization, (2) further subjugate an already politically vulnerable education sector to technocentric solutions, and (3) consolidate a theory of education driven by techno-utopianism, which generates an important gap between the “perfect” imaginaries and actualities. These shifts add up to a neoliberal vision of the datafied school, in which longstanding debates around “better” education are ostensibly resolved through artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies ranging from pervasive student surveillance, predictive analytics of student performance, and to hidden commodification of children’s everyday data.