An Ed-Tech Tragedy?

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed education from schools to screens at a pace and scale with no historical precedent. For hundreds of millions of students, formal learning became fully dependent on digital technology.

This book, structured across three ‘acts’, examines the numerous adverse and unintended consequences of the shift to ed-tech. It documents how digital-first solutions left a global majority of learners behind and details the many ways education was diminished even when technology was available and worked as intended.

In unpacking what went wrong, An Ed-Tech Tragedy? extracts lessons and recommends approaches to ensure that digital tools, including new AI applications, more reliably strengthen human relationships and better advance both the collective and individual purposes of education.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? tells the story of how thousands of schools, pupils, teachers and parents worldwide were suddenly thrust into predominantly technology-based education due as a consequence of the COVID-19 virus that was sweeping the globe.

UNESCO

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational technologies and school closures in the time of COVID-19

Critical acclaim

The New York Times
Challenges views that digital technologies are synonymous with educational equality and progress.
The Financial Times
The most extensive examination of the global lockdown experience in education.
South China Morning Post
Details how the tech-heavy response during COVID-19 was built on criticism of education as 'broken' and needing to be fixed.
Evgeny Morozov, author
To date, the book represents the most detailed analysis of how the rhetoric of technological solutionism comes to shape both policy debates and specific action on the ground.
Farida Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on the right to education
Brings strong evidence of the detrimental impact of the digitalization of education on the right to education. Its forceful voice amplifies the chorus of voices opposing the digitalization of education as a replacement to on-site schooling with teachers.
Justin Reich, professor and author
This book offers an important argument that educational technology was a force multiplier for inequality during the pandemic. … It will take many years to reckon with the consequences of the pandemic and this work will be essential in this endeavour.
Beeban Kidron, member of the House of Lords and chair of 5Rights Foundation
Thoughtful, fair and frightening, this is a book that exposes the folly of outsourcing education provision on the shiny – and unsupported – promises of new technology rather than investing in the long-term health of buildings, teachers and families.
Dan Wagner, professor and author
Like the best histories, 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?' shows us how we have arrived at our present moment, and how we can learn lessons from our past to achieve more equitable and inclusive futures.
Sonia Livingstone, professor and leader of the UK Digital Futures Commission
It is indeed a tragedy that during a global emergency, big tech chose profit over children’s best interests and that governments failed in their commitment to human rights. This timely book sets out a clear path to avoid such problems in the future.
Neil Selwyn, professor and author
This unflinching analysis should be read by policymakers, IT executives and developers, school leaders, teachers, parents and anyone else in a position to ensure that we do not find ourselves enduring the same mistakes again.
Michael Trucano, global lead for innovation in education at the World Bank
While technologies new and old certainly have important roles to play in supporting teaching and learning, 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?' reminds us that education remains a fundamentally human endeavour.
Halla Holmarsdottir, president of the Comparative & International Education Society
Points us towards more equitable and desirable paths ahead for digital learning.

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author
Groundbreaking and extraordinary. A world-spanning record of the impacts of screen-dependent learning.
Arjun Appadurai, anthropologist and author
Boldly resisting the temptation to forget the lessons of the COVID years, this landmark work gives us a sober guide to where the new educational technologies can help us, and how they could lead us significantly astray.
Diane Ravitch, historian and author
Wonderful and important. A warning that we ignore at our peril.
Adam Alter, professor and author
Thorough, methodical and well-researched. The result is a nuanced assessment of the promises of ed-tech and where those promises fall short.
Payal Arora, digital anthropologist and author
Groundbreaking and timely. Provides a crucial moral and intellectual compass to direct us away from the ed-tech solutionism that is causing unparalleled exclusion and is in process of untethering the right to education from that of schooling.
Ben Williamson, professor and author
An immense achievement, and a hugely important critical intervention into debates about the future role of digital technologies in education.
Audrey Watters, author and creator of Hack Education
What we see in these pages are the ways in which the pandemic and the embrace of digital education exacerbated many of the problems and inequalities that schools were already suffering from - historical problems and historical inequalities.
Bede Sheppard, deputy director of children's rights at Human Rights Watch
The analysis and recommendations detailed in 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?' provide policymakers an opportunity to consider how to use technology within education to strengthen and enable - rather than endanger - the wide spectrum of children's rights.
Shafika Isaacs, founder of SchoolNet Africa
'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?' offers a sobering, incisive critical analysis of the global remote and digital learning response to the COVID-19 historical moment. It is courageous in its challege of dominant commercialised ed-tech saviour narratives.
Kishore Signh, former UN special rapporteur on the right to education
With refreshing exactness, 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?' shows us how to chart a new course for education in digital age, safegarding it as a human right and public good.
Rebecca Stromeyer, founder and CEO of eLearning Africa
In 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy' UNESCO crafts a poignant narrative, unravelling the complexities of ed-tech's seemingly promising allure during the COVID-19 oandemic.

Setting the scene

Recent reviews

“An Ed-Tech Tragedy? chronicles a strange period of time where the meaning of education shifted in cataclysmic ways…. It jolts us into seeing what really happened in the weeks, months, and, in some cases, years that education ministries kept schools closed to the benefit of ed-tech.”

-Read the full 2025 review in the International Review of Education

“The book’s invocation of tragedy, beyond giving it a recognizable and thought-provoking organization, helps in another way: It keeps the enormity of what happened to home-bound and screen-bound learners between 2020 and 2022 in full view.”

-Read the full 2025 review at After Babel

©Rob Dobi

Editions

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? was originally released in September 2023.

A second edition, available in print as well as digital formats, was released in October 2025 through a partnership with Routledge.

A French language translation is expected in 2026.

©UNESCO

Organization

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? borrows the structure of a theatrical play to document and analyse the impacts and repercussions of the pivot from school-based education to remote distance learning with technology.

Act 1 details the hubris and ambition that often marked the initial transition from schools to ed-tech as the pandemic took hold.
Act 2 explains the many ways the promises of ed-tech collapsed when technology was deployed globally as a primary solution to maintain education during widespread and prolonged school closures. It reveals the harm and unintended consequences that resulted from endeavours to transition from in-person and school-based education to technology-reliant distance learning.
The Inter-Act questions dominant narratives to emerge from the technology-centric educational experiences of the pandemic period.
Act 3 puts forward principles and recommendations to guide future efforts to leverage technology for education, while keeping in-person schools and humans interaction at the centre of teaching and learning.