In EdTech's Hero's Journey, Is the Teacher the Villain?
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By Tobias Alencastro Silva
Every great transformation begins with a story—and education is no exception. But in EdTech’s narrative, teachers rarely get to be the heroes. As Stanford historian Larry Cuban tells us in his seminal work Teachers and Machines (1986), for over a century, we have been told the wrong story about technology in education and the teacher’s role. He documents that each generation of reformers predicted that new technologies would finally transform teaching: film would bring the world into classrooms, radio would democratize expert instruction, television would scale the best teachers, and computers would personalize learning. Yet what emerged instead was a discouraging pattern: a "cycle of exhilaration, scientific credibility, disappointment, and teacher-bashing" that drew its energy from "an unswerving, insistent impulse on the part of nonteachers to change classroom practice" (pp. 5–6).
In this reflection piece, we make the exercise of mapping the recurrent pattern Cuban identified in his work onto what mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949) called the "Hero's Journey"—a universal story structure where a protagonist receives a call to adventure, faces trials, undergoes transformation, and returns with wisdom. Crucially, the hero is transformed by the journey: Luke Skywalker masters the Force through struggle; Frodo is changed by carrying the Ring; Dorothy learns that “there is no place like home”.
But when exercising the mapping of the journey onto EdTech, the story twists: the invention, not human, takes center stage. And it gets even stranger: technology becomes both the “call to adventure,” with promises to transform the “ordinary world” of the classroom, and the Hero called to action, poised to collide with the “guardian at the threshold” (the teacher). Its endgame: to revolutionize a supposedly outdated educational landscape.
This isn't just bad storytelling or rhetoric; it's an agenda. It shapes public perception and policy, determining who is seen as the protagonist and who is treated as the problem. Within this narrative, I theorize teachers are consistently cast into one of two problematic roles:
The Gatekeeper-Antagonist: The teacher as an obstacle to progress. When adoption is slow, Cuban notes, the cycle produces "stinging rebukes of narrow-minded, stubborn teachers reluctant to use learning tools" (p. 5). Pedagogical concerns become "inertia or knee-jerk conservatism" (p. 6). Or in our analogy: the teacher becomes the threshold guardian blocking progress.
The Obsolete Mentor: The teacher as wise but fading guide—useful only until technology takes over. This archetype grows from the dream of "increasing productivity," where students can "acquire more information with the same or even less teacher effort" (Cuban, 1986, p. 3). Like Yoda, the mentor equips the hero but must yield for the final battle.
A recent Bloomberg article by Vauhini Vara titled “AI and Chatbots Are Already Reshaping U.S. Classrooms” (2025) offers a firsthand look at the current version of this narrative. It describes the model promoted by AlphaSchool, which explicitly positions teachers as “guides on the side” while AI handles instruction. But it goes deeper. As documented in Vara’s investigation, these “guides” aren't even required to be licensed teachers—the platform's CEO describes them primarily as motivators who “encourage students” while the technology provides auto-instruction or performs the “actual” teaching. In practice, technology takes the leading role—not teachers, and not even students.
But why are those narratives so persistent?
In Distrusting Educational Technology (2013), Neil Selwyn offers reflections that allow us to get closer to answering the question: educational technologies persist not because they consistently succeed in classrooms, but because they advance broader economic and ideological projects and wider neoliberal agendas (p. 16). Technology doesn't need to work pedagogically; it needs to enable market expansion and reshape teaching into a "deliverable" commodity. That is what really keeps the story going.
So, what should be done? If we accept Campbell's framework as a reflective canvas, we must recognize where we stand now: the Belly of the Beast. Campbell's transformative crucible where the hero must "die" to be reborn. The transformation of the narrative begins with the recognition that we are already deep inside the ordeal. AI's velocity, pervasiveness, and ubiquity, backed by Big Tech other players, represent something qualitatively different from Cuban's previous cycles—not just another film projector or computer lab, but a technology that promises to automate the very act of teaching itself.
Teachers already face this monster's digestive forces: moral dilemmas about AI-generated assignments, stress from constant adaptation demands, often with their performance evaluations and job security at stake, yet the question remains whether we recognize these pressures as political forces to be resisted collectively or accept them as inevitable progress. We are already inside the beast, so what are we going to do about it? Achieving the clarity of the situation makes possible a deeper choice: we must pursue changing the story itself.
The "death" is of the teacher as an individual; the "rebirth" is as part of a collective force ready to define which changes serve students and whose vision of education prevails. As the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire argued (1995),
"The educational practice undoubtedly demands political awareness of the educators in relation to its projects. It is not enough to say that education is a political act just as it is not enough to say that the political act is also educational. It is necessary to truly assume the ‘politicity’ of education" (p. 46).
This is where we dig our toes in the sand—not in resistance to change, but as an act of conscious responsibility towards the political character of education, aiming to reposition teaching as a means of liberation, with technology serving as a tool rather than a shackle.
Tobias Alencastro Silva holds a Master's degree in Scientific and Technological Education from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), where his dissertation on technology risk assessment in education developed a comprehensive framework for evaluating digital platform impacts. With a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from UFSC, including international study at the University of Warsaw, he bridges critical technology theory with practical implementation. He currently works as an Educational Technology Analyst developing human-centered digital integration projects, and is the creator of INTEGRA PERIFA, a critical digital inclusion project focused on digital literacy and citizenship in peripheral communities using methodologies adapted for low-connectivity environments. His work synthesizes Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy with contemporary technoethics through his "Technoethical Praxis" methodology, empowering communities to recognize and resist harmful technological dynamics. He is currently pursuing a specialization in Applied Computing in Education at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ), combining philosophical depth with hands-on technical experimentation in AI safety and educational technology.
References
Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press.
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920. Teachers College Press.
Fowler, G. A. (2025, January 9). Google’s AI tool that helps students cheat is a red flag. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com
Freire, P. (1995). Política e educação: Ensaios. Cortez.
Selwyn, N. (2013). Distrusting educational technology: Critical questions for changing times. Routledge.
Vara, V. (2025, September 11). AI and chatbots are already reshaping U.S. classrooms. Bloomberg.AI and Chatbots Are Already Reshaping US Classrooms - Bloomberg