Thibaud, E. (2025). Reflections on techno-solutionism in education: Manifestations and causes. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–12.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2025.2528852
Abstract
Techno-solutionism refers to the belief that many of society’s ills can and should be solved by technology. This paper explores the ways techno-solutionism manifests itself in the field of education: for the past few decades, each new technology trend has been promised to improve the quality of teaching, boost students’ engagement and performances, save time, and increase access to education. The paper starts with the following observation: despite decades of increasing digitalisation of classrooms and development of e-learning tools, neither performances nor equality of access to quality education have significantly improved. From these observations, the paper examines the reasons that education remains fixated on techno-solutionism, despite its disappointing outcomes. It proposes to look at this tension in light of various philosophical concepts, from Foucault’s homo economicus to Biesta’s learnification, to understand the roots of this persistent belief.
Keywords:
Techno-solutionism, education. technology, neoliberalism
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Thibaud’s analysis of techno-solutionism in education explores how educational technology consistently fails to deliver on its transformative promises despite decades of digital expansion, but it neglects the specific ways that online education functions as a credentialist system that inadvertently enables and amplifies AI-assisted cheating like ChatGPT. This reveals a deeper problem with techno-solutionism: it doesn’t just fail to solve educational problems – it systematically reinforces the neoliberal logic that created those problems in the first place. As Thibaud’s framework suggests, each new technology promised to improve education actually serves to further marketize and instrumentalize the educational process.
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