Must We Surrender Education to Technology?

The classroom, once the sacred domain of the teacher, is now a shrine to digitized “learning experiences” whose fundamental assumption is that the newest tool is the best tool.

There are books that diagnose, books that predict, and books that lament. But rare is the book that does all three with the precision and prophetic clarity of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. More than three decades after its publication, Postman’s work stands as a terrifyingly accurate map of our modern landscape, where the unquestioned ascendancy of technology shapes our cultural, moral, and intellectual lives in ways both insidious and profound.

If Orwell warned of a future of coercion, and Huxley of a future of seduction, Postman unveils a present of abdication, a world in which we have ceded not just our autonomy but our way of thinking to the demands of a technological regime that knows no principle higher than efficiency, no virtue greater than novelty, no standard beyond utility.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in education, where Postman’s warnings have ripened into full reality. The modern school, enthralled by the gospel of innovation, is increasingly a servile arm of technological determinism, trading wisdom for data. The classroom, once the sacred domain of the teacher, is now a shrine to digitized “learning experiences” whose fundamental assumption is that the newest tool is the best tool. The implicit message: knowledge is something to be accessed, outsourced, and, at best, managed.

This is precisely the Technopoly that Postman warns against: a society that not only uses technology but is used by it, that does not merely employ technological tools but allows those tools to dictate its epistemology. In the realm of education, this manifests in a shift away from the cultivation of intellect and virtue and toward a fixation on “21st-century skills”—skills that are perpetually obsolescent, forever needing to be “updated” in an economy driven by technological acceleration.

Knowledge, under this paradigm, is reduced to the instrumental, severed from its moral and philosophical roots, stripped of its capacity to orient human beings toward truth. The teacher, once a conduit of wisdom, becomes a facilitator of “content delivery,” while the student becomes a passive sponge meant to absorb fragments of information. And education, once the great inheritance of civilization, becomes an exercise in credentialing, in the production of technically competent functionaries whose highest achievement is their adaptability to the shifting needs of the technological economy.

If Postman’s critique is devastating, his implied remedy is profound. And it is here that the classical model of education emerges not just as a corrective but as an antidote. Classical education, with its deep roots in the Western intellectual tradition, resists the reductionism of Technopoly by insisting that education is not merely about the transmission of information but about the formation of the soul.

In contrast to the modern impulse to replace teachers with technology, classical education affirms the irreplaceable role of the teacher as mentor, guide, and steward of wisdom. Against the digital fragmentation of knowledge, classical education posits an integrated vision of learning, one that situates mathematics, history, literature, and philosophy within a coherent moral and metaphysical framework. And in response to the cult of innovation, classical education turns deliberately to the past as a recognition that the most pressing questions of human existence have already been asked, and that the answers lie not in the blind pursuit of progress but in the disciplined study of the great thinkers and traditions that have shaped our civilization.

Postman, though not a classicist in the strict sense, understood that a society that abandons its past also abandons its capacity for judgment. He lamented a world in which information had become “a form of garbage” precisely because it was untethered from meaning. The classical tradition, by contrast, insists that knowledge is inseparable from wisdom, and wisdom from virtue. It seeks not simply to inform but to form—to cultivate human beings capable of seeing beyond the ephemeral demands of the present and into the enduring realities that make life worth living.

Thus, to read Technopoly today is not merely to recognize the scope of our predicament but to glimpse the path of renewal. In its critique, we see the urgency of resisting the mechanization of education. In its warnings, we find the necessity of restoring an education that is human, moral, and purposeful. And in its prophetic wisdom, we discover that the antidote to Technopoly is not found in another innovation, another program, another system, but in the very thing that technology cannot replicate: the living tradition of truth, goodness, and beauty passed from one generation to the next through the hard, patient work of genuine education.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.