If I See One More Person Push “PedTech,” I’m Going to Vomit

Pedagogy was never the missing idea. The harder problem was building an industry whose economics allowed pedagogy to remain at the center when investment dollars came knocking.

I have apparently reached the stage of my career where ideas we discussed as novel more than ten years ago have now returned with new names and are presented to me as revolutionary discoveries. Watching the current conversation around “PedTech,” I keep thinking about The Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone is admiring the new outfit, and I am standing in the corner wondering whether we are allowed to point out that we have seen it before.

The latest outfit is “PedTech.” The argument seems sensible enough. We have focused too much on technology in the education space and need to redesign around pedagogy, ensuring better learning outcomes and designing for actual improved learning. Start with the learning problem. Understand the learner. Support the teacher. Stop digitizing content for the sake of digitizing content. Build technology around how people actually learn.

Yes, obviously. We were saying this ten years ago, and people were saying it long before I entered the industry. Teachers were saying it before most edtech companies existed. Researchers built entire careers around it. Instructional designers had methodologies for it, and edtech founders wrote it into their pitch decks. So when I see “pedagogy first” presented as the correction to a previous generation of edtech, I find the implied history slightly insulting.

I have never hired anyone to work on the educational side of CanopyLAB who wasn't deeply passionate about learning and pedagogy. The problem was not that an entire generation forgot pedagogy. The problem is much more uncomfortable: a great many people who cared deeply about pedagogy built companies inside an economic system that repeatedly made it difficult to keep pedagogy first. That distinction matters.

Nobody chose edtech because it was the easiest place to get rich

There is a strange caricature beginning to emerge of the previous generation of edtech. Apparently, we were a collection of technologists who became so excited about software that nobody remembered to ask whether students learned anything. I do not recognize that industry.

Of course there were opportunists. There were bad products, founders who over time cared more about growth than outcomes, and investors who cared primarily about returns. That is true of every technology category. But education technology has never been the most obvious place to go if your sole objective is maximizing financial return.

When I told my friends I was leaving academia to become a founder in tech, they were excited. When I told them that I was building an edtech company, they reminded me that before academia I had been in consulting, and that returning there probably made more sense financially and reputationally.

If I knew then what I know now, I would seriously reconsider starting anything in the edtech space. Institutional sales cycles are long. Procurement is painful. Budgets are constrained. Teachers are overloaded. Schools are political. Universities move slowly. Implementation is expensive. Education systems are fragmented across countries, municipalities, institutions, curricula, languages and regulatory environments. The person using the product is frequently not the person buying it, and the person buying it may not control whether anybody uses it. Even when the product works beautifully, proving that somebody actually learned because of it can be surprisingly difficult.

There have always been easier places to sell software. A great many people entered education technology because they cared about education. Teachers became founders. Researchers became founders. Parents became founders. People who had experienced terrible education systems became founders. People who believed access could be improved became founders. People who thought technology could give learners something the existing system could not became founders. Many of us were idealistic enough to believe that better pedagogy and better technology could reinforce each other. That did not prevent us from building an industry with serious problems, but it changes the diagnosis.

Caring about pedagogy did not save us

This is the part I think the PedTech conversation risks missing. Good intentions do not automatically produce good systems. A founder can care deeply about teachers and still build software teachers do not use. A company can begin with excellent learning science and still end up optimizing completion rates. An instructional designer can create a beautiful learning experience and discover that the buyer wants 147 features in the procurement document. A team can believe in learner agency and still discover that its largest customer wants mandatory pathways, reporting and administrator controls.

A founder can want to reduce teacher workload and still be forced to add another dashboard because the person signing the contract needs something measurable to show their boss. A company can genuinely care about learning outcomes and still discover that logins, clicks, minutes watched and courses completed are dramatically easier to put into a quarterly report.

Nobody has to be evil for this to happen. The incentives only have to point in slightly different directions, because over enough years slightly different directions become entirely different destinations. That is why I find “we need to put pedagogy first” insufficient. Many people tried. The more useful question is why they so often failed to keep it there.

Perhaps the failure was structural, not philosophical

Imagine that the entire previous generation had been given better advice: pedagogy first, diagnose the problem, understand the learner, support the teacher and measure outcomes. Would the industry necessarily look dramatically different? I am not convinced.

Eventually somebody still has to pay. That person may be a school district, a university, a corporation, a ministry, a parent or an investor, and each introduces constraints that have very little to do with instructional theory. The school district wants integration. The university wants compliance. The corporation wants reporting. The procurement team wants security documentation. The investor wants growth. The board wants recurring revenue. The founder wants enough runway to survive another year.

Then the beautifully diagnosed pedagogical problem enters a commercial machine, and that machine changes things. Perhaps the best intervention requires substantial teacher involvement, which makes implementation expensive. Perhaps the learner should only use the product occasionally, which makes retention look terrible. Perhaps the correct solution is five excellent learning moments rather than fifty hours of content, which makes the catalogue look small. Perhaps the most pedagogically responsible conclusion is that the institution does not need another platform, which makes the sales meeting awkward.

The conflict was never simply pedagogy versus technology. It was pedagogy versus the economics surrounding the technology.

If pedagogy really comes first, sometimes there is no software company

This is the test that interests me. Imagine somebody diagnoses an educational problem perfectly. They understand the learner, the teacher, the context and what the evidence suggests is likely to work. After doing all of that, they discover that the best intervention is a teacher guide, three printable exercises and a weekly conversation. Wonderful. Is that PedTech? Probably not. Is it pedagogically sound? It might be.

Now imagine another problem where the best intervention is a WhatsApp group, a workbook and access to a human mentor. Again, perhaps excellent education, but still not a particularly exciting venture-backed software company. This is where “pedagogy first” becomes much more demanding than it initially sounds. Pedagogy does not owe us software. It does not owe us recurring revenue or venture returns, and it certainly does not care whether the intervention has gross margins above 80%.

If we genuinely put pedagogy first, we have to accept that sometimes technology comes second, sometimes it comes last and occasionally it should not come at all. That creates a difficult problem for an industry whose business model requires technology to remain somewhere near the center.

And the timing of the rebrand is interesting

I might be less irritated by PedTech if it were appearing in a vacuum, but it is not. Edtech is going through a category identity crisis at precisely the same time as people are discovering that perhaps they were never really edtech companies or investors in the first place.

Investors historically associated with education increasingly describe themselves through broader territories. I have argued before that edtech becomes learning, learning becomes skills, skills become workforce development, and workforce development becomes human capital, career mobility, productivity, AI adoption or human potential. Companies are doing the same thing. Education companies become skills companies. Learning companies become workforce platforms. Financial education companies become money apps. Coding products become AI adoption products.

Many of these changes make perfectly good strategic sense. Markets move, technology changes and companies should evolve. I have no particular attachment to keeping a company inside a category that no longer describes what it does. But the timing is worth noticing.

Edtech has endured collapsing venture investment, disappointing public-market outcomes, low utilization of software and now competition from general-purpose AI products capable of delivering many of the things that previously required a specialized platform. At precisely that moment, a remarkable number of people are discovering that they no longer belong to edtech. Then, right in the middle of that identity crisis, we discover PedTech.

Perhaps it represents a genuinely new discipline, and I am open to being convinced. But when a struggling category suddenly discovers a new name for one of its oldest principles, I think we are entitled to inspect the clothes before applauding the emperor.

You cannot rebrand your way out of incentives

Suppose every edtech company changed its name to PedTech tomorrow. What would actually be different on Monday morning? The school procurement department would send the same tender. The corporate buyer would request the same reporting. The teacher would still have the same number of hours in the day. The investor would still expect a return, the board would still track recurring revenue, the sales team would still have a quota and the customer would still expect implementation.

Nothing important would have changed, which is why I am much more interested in whether PedTech represents a different economic and delivery model than whether it represents a different philosophy. If customers begin paying for demonstrated outcomes rather than access, that is interesting. If teachers actually gain time instead of receiving another administrative responsibility, that is interesting. If evidence becomes central to procurement, products become smaller because smaller is pedagogically better, or investors become comfortable funding businesses whose educational value does not naturally translate into conventional SaaS economics, then we are beginning to talk about structural change.

Those changes would matter because they alter the incentives surrounding the pedagogy. Putting “pedagogy first” on a slide does not.

The previous generation deserves criticism. There were too many platforms, too many unused licenses, too much content, too little evidence and too many engagement metrics mistaken for learning. Many products required enormous behavioral change from teachers who were already exhausted, and too much capital went into companies whose economics probably never justified it. Some of us built that industry, and we should be willing to admit where we were wrong.

But if people with good intentions, relevant expertise and a genuine commitment to education still produced products with poor adoption, weak evidence and difficult economics, then the interesting question is not whether they remembered to put pedagogy first. It is why caring about pedagogy was so often insufficient. Maybe procurement rewards features more reliably than outcomes. Maybe venture capital pushes education companies toward growth models that do not fit education. Maybe SaaS encourages recurring usage even when good learning does not require recurring software usage. Maybe institutional buyers and individual learners value fundamentally different things. Maybe some educational problems are simply not good venture-backed software opportunities. Those questions are considerably harder than inventing a new category, which is precisely why they are more useful.

A new category should explain something new

I am not opposed to new terminology. Useful categories help us distinguish things that previously looked the same because something material has changed. SaaS described a genuinely different delivery and economic model, while generative AI describes a genuinely different technological capability. A useful category should therefore be able to tell us what has changed.

So tell me what changed with PedTech. What can a company do today that a pedagogy-led education company could not do ten years ago? What new delivery model exists? What new economic model exists? What incentive has been realigned? What institutional constraint disappeared? What evidence standard changed, and what changed in the behavior of the buyer?

If PedTech answers those questions, I will happily listen. But if the answer is simply that we should start with pedagogy, diagnose the learning problem, understand the learner and support teachers, then I am sorry: you have not invented a category. You have described what good edtech was always trying to become.

That distinction matters because if the previous generation failed primarily because it had the wrong philosophy, the solution is wonderfully easy. Teach everyone the correct philosophy, give it a new name and try again. If the failure was structural, the work ahead is much harder. We have to rethink what gets funded, what gets purchased, what gets measured, how learning is delivered, where software belongs and whether every valuable educational intervention needs to become a scalable technology company in the first place.

That would be a real reset. PedTech, so far, is a word. We should absolutely put pedagogy first, and we should have done it yesterday as well as tomorrow, but we should not confuse rediscovering an old principle with changing the system that repeatedly made the principle difficult to follow.

The conversation worth having is not EdTech versus PedTech, which word gets the next conference track or who has suddenly discovered that teachers matter. The question is whether we can finally build an economic and delivery model in which the thing everyone claims to put first is actually allowed to stay there.

If PedTech does that, dress it however you like, and I will happily admit that the emperor has a new wardrobe. But if all we have done is rediscover pedagogy and give it a conference track, somebody eventually has to point out that we have seen these clothes before. If they are presented to me as a revolutionary new outfit one more time, I may genuinely vomit.