Education Policy Imaginary and Crises: The Case of EdTech and the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

Crises manifest in diverse ways and among the various effects that ensue, educational provisioning is impacted. Crises may result in significant shifts in how education figures in the policy imaginary. The COVID-19 crisis marks one such moment that decisively shaped the education policy imaginary. EdTech came to be seen as a global solution enabling education to continue in an uninterrupted manner. This new imaginary is distinct from the pre-pandemic models (that sought to integrate digital technologies into education in a phased manner) in that EdTech can be packaged, personalised, platformed and made available to consumers at their convenience and capacity to pay for devices and resources. The note thus tracks the emergence during the COVID-19 crisis of an education policy imaginary that is built around EdTech and argues for the need to critically review it, given how such policy responses can and do reveal and exacerbate the existing inequities in education.