US tech giants reshape American classrooms in their mould
Some of the most influential Silicon Valley billionaires have been altering attitudes to learning in the US by working directly with schools and education funding campaigns. There has been a concerted effort to remodel the curriculum by introducing coding into schools and integrating new technology into the classroom. The combination of directly teaching skills relevant to their businesses whilst promoting their own brand across US public schools has been accelerating mostly under the radar of public scrutiny. For example, Mark Zuckerberg has started testing learning software in over a hundred American schools, whilst Reed Hastings of Netflix has touted a math teaching programme that deploys Netflix-like algorithms.
In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.

In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors.

In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.