Public Education Shouldn't Run on Big Tech's Terms

Key Takeaways

• Most schools now run on digital platforms built by private companies for commercial purposes, not educational ones.
• A new UNESCO-UNICEF-ITU Charter calls for public digital learning platforms governed and financed for the public good.
• Media information literacy is the foundational skill students most need online, yet the least centered by for-profit platforms.
• When private companies control educational infrastructure, they also shape what digital citizenship looks like for the next generation.

Today is World Youth Skills Day, UNESCO's annual occasion to focus on young people's access to skills for a changing world. This year, UNESCO marked it with the launch of a Skills for the Future Platform, built to connect youth with digital and AI training globally. The numbers behind it are striking. Some 450 million young people worldwide currently lack the skills they need to participate in the labor market, and one in five people between 15 and 34 is entirely disengaged from formal skill development pathways. The urgency is real. But underneath the push to get young people skilled up and online, there's a question that rarely gets asked loudly enough: who actually controls the digital spaces where all this learning happens?

The Private Takeover of Public Classrooms

Schools have been moving online for years, and the shift accelerated sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic when every learning environment had to go digital almost overnight. The platforms that filled the gap were mostly built by private, for-profit companies: Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams for Education, Zoom, and Canvas. They moved fast, they were free or subsidized, and they worked. What most schools didn't examine in the urgency of the moment was what it meant to hand the infrastructure of public education to companies whose core business models were built around workplace productivity, user engagement, or advertising, not learning.

The UNESCO-UNICEF-ITU Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms names this problem directly. It points out that most of the widely used platforms in education today were built by private corporations, and that many of them were originally designed for workplace productivity, general communication, or user engagement rather than learning. The Charter identifies the downstream effects of this mismatch: tools built on commercial logic can restrict access, treat students and teachers as consumers, create long-term technical dependencies on private vendors, introduce health and safety risks, and gradually erode a government's ability to steer its own education system.

This is a UN document about education policy. If you read it carefully, it’s also a warning about what happens when infrastructure adopted in a crisis becomes the permanent architecture of a public good.

Data Extraction and the Student-As-User Problem

When students log into a privately run platform, they generate data. What they click on, how long they spend on each screen, what they search for, and how they progress through material. In a publicly governed system, that data is treated as sensitive information about learners and belongs to the education system. In a commercially governed system, the incentives are different, and the terms of service are usually written to favor the platform.

The Charter is specific about what the alternative should look like. It calls for student and teacher data to remain under national jurisdiction and public control, treated as sensitive by default, and never handed to third parties without clear agreements. It also takes direct aim at the practice of asking students and families to click through lengthy terms and conditions to access compulsory education, arguing that governments take responsibility for the safety of physical schools and should do the same for digital ones. Putting that responsibility on individual users and their families is not a reasonable ask when the platform is part of a public education system.

The data problem is structural, not accidental. A for-profit company builds a free platform, offers it to schools, and the business model is built around what happens to the data later. Several countries have had to investigate or pull EdTech products after deployment, once the actual terms of data use became clear. The fact that this keeps happening is a design feature of the system, not a bug.

Media Information Literacy Is the Missing Skill

There’s another dimension to this that World Youth Skills Day should center more prominently. The conversation about digital skills tends to focus on technical outputs: coding, AI literacy, cybersecurity, and digital tools. These matter. But the skill that determines whether any of them are used well or badly is media information literacy (MIL), the ability to find, evaluate, and critically engage with information online.

UNESCO has developed media and information literacy frameworks and curricula for educators that treat this skill as foundational to free expression and democratic participation. As someone who has worked directly with national MIL development, I agree. The framework teaches students not just how to use the internet, but how to think about what they encounter on it: how to evaluate the credibility of a source, recognize manipulation, and understand when a platform's design is working on them rather than for them.

This last point matters especially when students are spending their school days inside platforms built to maximize engagement. A platform optimized for engagement and a platform optimized for learning are not the same thing, and young people deserve to understand the difference. Media information literacy is the skill that makes that distinction readable, not abstract.

Education Online Has to Be a Public Good

I don't think for-profit companies should be excluded from education technology. They build useful things, and public institutions often lack the resources to build everything from scratch. But the infrastructure of education, the platforms students depend on every school day to learn, cannot be allowed to default permanently to whoever offers the cheapest or most convenient product.

The Charter's call is clear and worth repeating: digital learning platforms should be public, inclusive, open, and trustworthy. They should be "open to as many users as possible, including users who may decline to establish profiles with email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, national identification numbers, passwords, or other identifying information." That sentence describes a fundamentally different internet relationship than the one most students currently have with their school platforms. It describes education technology built for learners, not for users.

The 450 million young people who need better digital futures deserve more than faster access to the same extractive systems. They deserve to be taught on infrastructure that is accountable to them and their communities, and taught with the skills to think critically about every platform they encounter. That combination, public infrastructure and real media literacy, is what a free digital education actually looks like.