A reflection on three articles that caught my eye this week: A Crisis of Trust in the Classroom (Seth Bruggeman); ‘I’ve been a teacher for 20 years. Here’s why I’m not returning in 2025.’ (Anon.); Online educational populism and New Right 2.0 in Australia and England (Steven Watson & Naomi Barnes).
A Crisis of Trust in the Classroom
This week, Inside Higher Ed featured a compelling piece by Seth C. Bruggeman, an associate professor of history at Temple University, who delves into the growing crisis of trust in our classrooms. Drawing from his extensive teaching experience, Bruggeman observes that education has increasingly become transactional and commodified, leading to a detrimental impact on both teaching quality and the cultivation of informed citizens.
[W]hen I told my students that I couldn’t trust them anymore, I wanted them to know that I wasn’t just upset about cheating. What really worried me was the possibility that our ability to trust one another in the classroom had been derailed by the same sort of crass profiteering that explains why, for instance, so many of our neighbors’ homes get bulldozed and replaced with cheap student apartments. That in a class where I’d tried to teach them to be better citizens of our democracy, to discern public good from private profit, to see value in the arts and culture beyond their capacity to generate revenue, so many students kept trying to succeed by deploying the usual strategies of the profiteer…
Bruggeman notes that students often approach education as consumers, seeking a return on investment rather than engaging in a transformative learning process. This shift fosters a mindset where education is viewed as a commodity, undermining the intrinsic value of learning and eroding the trust essential for meaningful educational experiences.
He warns that this commodification not only diminishes the quality of teaching but also hampers the development of critical thinking and active citizenship. When education is reduced to a mere transaction, it jeopardises our ability to cultivate the kind of informed citizenry that democracy requires.
For history educators, Bruggeman’s insights are particularly resonant. The discipline of history thrives on critical inquiry and the exploration of diverse perspectives. The commodification of education threatens these core aspects, making it imperative for educators to reflect on how to rebuild trust and re-emphasize the transformative power of learning.
Bruggeman’s article serves as a crucial reminder of the need to resist the commodification of education and to strive towards fostering environments where trust, critical thinking, and genuine engagement are paramount.
I don’t fault my students for mistrusting me or the systems that we’ve come to rely on in the university. I too am skeptical about the integrity of our nation’s educational landscape.
‘I’ve been a teacher for 20 years. Here’s why I’m not returning in 2025.’
In mid-December 2024, Mamamia published a heartfelt reflection by a former teacher grappling with the impact of an increasingly data-focused education system. The author shares how their enthusiasm for teaching was eroded by the relentless emphasis on quantifiable outcomes, overshadowing what they saw as the broader purpose of education: fostering curiosity, critical thinking, and lifelong learning.
I’m not leaving because I don’t love educating. It’s largely because I cannot get on board with the ever-increasing focus on data. The vast majority of learning activities are grounded in measurable, comparable results in figures.
One of the key concerns raised was the role of data in shaping not only classroom practices but also broader school activities like staff meetings. These meetings often became dominated by discussions about data, test results, and strategies to meet performance benchmarks. For the author, this narrowed focus left little time to explore deeper, more meaningful conversations about pedagogy, wellbeing, or professional growth.
The article underscores a critical issue: when education is reduced to what can be measured, valuable aspects of teaching and learning risk being overlooked. The author reflects on how this fixation on data affects the long-term wellbeing of students. The overemphasis on testing and measurable outcomes detracts from more holistic approaches to learning and development, creating a system that values numbers over people.
We don’t read and discuss poetry for pleasure or so we can make a lovely poem for a family member; we do this briefly and then focus on teaching students the criteria of the rubric for the poetry assessment, so we can grade them on their final poem/s… Life-long learning and future wellbeing are not the goal because you can’t assess those easily with data.
For educators, particularly those in fields like history, where fostering critical thinking and exploring complex ideas are core to the discipline, this shift is deeply concerning. Lifelong learning and the skills that nurture thoughtful, engaged citizens don’t easily fit into spreadsheets, yet they are foundational to education’s broader mission.
This article invites us to reconsider the priorities in education. It indicates there’s truth in the axiom that ‘if it isn’t measured, it isn’t valued’ and calls for a system that balances accountability with the creativity, connection, and growth that make education transformative for both teachers and students. Perhaps we need to have a broader conversation about what matters most in our society and see that this is reflected in our education systems. If we’re going to build systems that put enormous stock in data, then maybe we need to find ways of measuring different things.
Imagine if all that money, time and energy spent on data collection, data analysis and data presentations went into making schools engaging places of belonging and life-long learning for those who attend. Imagine that …
Online educational populism and New Right 2.0 in Australia and England
For those of us who make use of online social media spaces, this next article is crucial. It’s not just extremists of ‘the platform formerly known as Twitter’ who provoke online polarisation. Online polarisation exists in educational dialogue as well.
Attention has been paid to how affordances of social media have supported the rise of mass populist movements, but little attention has been paid to how the same conditions have emerged in smaller online policy communities, such as eduTwitter. As the education of the nation is a key policy site of struggle and com-promise, it lends its rhetoric to populism
Steven Watson and Naomi Barnes have put together a fascinating paper on such polarisation and explore the intersection of populism, social media, and education policy in Australia and England. The article explores how social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn may be a rich field for the growth of educational populism, where educators, think tanks, and other stakeholders use digital tools to challenge traditional authority and influence policy debates.
At the heart of their analysis is the concept of micropopulism—small-scale populist movements that operate within niche communities, such as “eduTwitter” in England. These movements often frame teachers as “the people” and academics or policymakers as “the elite.” Social media amplifies these divisions, fostering polarisation by privileging emotionally charged content over rational debate. Watson and Barnes argue that while such platforms can democratise educational discourse, they also risk entrenching simplistic narratives and undermining the complex work of education systems.
Online educational populism did not appear from nowhere, it is the consequence of several factors. The first of which is technology; the role of social media and how individuals communicate with each other on platforms like Twitter…Our second connected factor then, beyond but connected to technology, concerns society, culture and politics and this includes norms of behaviour, people’s relationship to power and the extent to which people feel that they can influence things to address the challenges in their lives.
In Australia, this phenomenon is closely tied to New Right 2.0—a modern iteration of conservative economic and social values that leverages both traditional and digital media to push for reforms like privatisation and performance-based accountability in education. The authors point to think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which use populist rhetoric on social media to challenge universities and public institutions, positioning them as bloated or out of touch.
For educators using social media, this paper offers essential insights. While platforms can be invaluable for professional development and advocacy, they are also fertile ground for polarisation and algorithm-driven manipulation. The authors suggest that educators need to develop critical digital citizenship skills—not just to navigate these spaces ethically and effectively but to understand how digital algorithms shape discourse and amplify certain voices.
Digital citizenship requires an understanding of the forces at work in the digital environment but also how to safely and ethically engage in an environment that that exists. For example, Barnes (2020) recommends that school leaders have conversations with teachers about their social media usage as a part of school leadership responsibility to staff welfare.
This article is a call to reflect on how we, as educators, engage with social media. Are we contributing to meaningful dialogue, or are we unintentionally reinforcing polarised debates and echo chambers? How can we balance the opportunities these platforms provide with the challenges they present to our professional values and educational goals?
The education sector is one of many social institutions being challenged by populism. A broader commitment to critical digital citizenship needs discussion on a national scale by governments, platforms business and media outlets
Disrupted History 
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