From Obsolete Trends to True Inclusion: Embracing Matristic Values in Education
Capitalism has a peculiar way of embracing marginalised groups at the very moment a skill or opportunity becomes obsolete. Historically, this pattern repeats itself: people with disabilities, for instance, were trained for assembly-line work just as manufacturing moved offshore or was mechanised. Later, they were encouraged to learn clerical tasks such as typing, which soon became redundant with the rise of personal computers. Today, we see this same cycle with programming—a skill increasingly automated by large language models (LLMs) and other “AI” tools. The appearance of inclusion in these moments is deceiving, as it often reinforces existing inequities by placing marginalised groups on a treadmill of outdated skills, perpetuating dependency rather than fostering true autonomy.
This dynamic is apparent in a recent study on teaching basic programming to adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) using JClic, an open-source software platform. The study highlights the potential of explicit instruction paired with interactive tools to develop cognitive skills, such as memory and executive functioning. On the surface, this appears to be a promising initiative—the participants reportedly gained confidence and demonstrated enthusiasm for the tasks. However, a closer look reveals a different story. The study’s focus is not on the participants’ broader empowerment or their integration into meaningful, independent roles in society. Instead, it centres on the tool itself: JClic’s adaptability, its ability to facilitate task completion, and its alignment with the researchers’ predefined objectives. The learners, whilst involved, appear secondary to the study’s primary goal of proving the efficacy of the technology.
This prioritisation of tools over people reflects a systemic shortcoming in how education and inclusion for individuals with ID are often approached. Rather than asking what skills and experiences will most empower these individuals for a future shaped by rapid technological and social change, the study falls into the trap of celebrating the tool as the solution. By doing so, it risks perpetuating a long-standing pattern of offering marginalised groups opportunities that lead nowhere, whilst true paths to equity and autonomy remain unexplored.
Capitalism’s Pattern of Marginalisation
This cyclical pattern of offering training in soon-to-be-obsolete skills to marginalised communities is not new. Decades ago, as manufacturing industries began to haemorrhage jobs due to outsourcing and mechanisation, people with disabilities were steered towards assembly-line roles already poised for extinction. Under frameworks like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in the United States, these workers could be paid sub-minimum wages, whilst companies often received tax credits for employing them—effectively doubling their financial gain. Instead of genuine empowerment, this arrangement provided a fleeting illusion of inclusion, with workers trained in skills on the cusp of irrelevance. Once their labour was fully extracted at discount rates, the disabled workers were swiftly and unceremoniously laid off, leaving them no closer to long-term security or autonomy than before.
A similar scenario unfolded with clerical work. As personal computers spread and software advanced, tasks that had once needed human typists or data entry clerks were rapidly automated. Yet, just before this shift, marginalised groups—particularly those with disabilities—were again encouraged to learn these very roles. By capitalising on sub-minimum wages and claiming tax incentives, employers profited from this short-term employment scheme even as the work itself lost market value. Rather than adjusting educational programmes to anticipate technological transitions, institutions simply reassigned soon-to-be redundant tasks to an already vulnerable population. The result was a system in which these workers bore the brunt of the labour market’s indifference, discarded when no longer profitable, and left without meaningful paths to true inclusion or autonomy.
Now we see this pattern once again with programming skills. Just as coding faces the onslaught of automation, large language models, and other so-called “AI” solutions, there is a push to teach people with intellectual disabilities these very competencies. On paper, it looks progressive: educators and policymakers can point to these efforts as evidence of inclusion. Yet in reality, what is being “included” is often a skill set in the twilight of its market relevance. Individuals who go through these training programmes may feel momentarily uplifted by their achievements, but the structures of capitalism do not bend to their efforts. Instead, they serve as canaries in the coal mine—signals that when a skill set is extended to those most marginalised, it may well be on the verge of technological obsolescence.
In this way, capitalism’s pattern of marginalisation persists. The cycle—assembly lines, clerical work, coding—is a testament to how systemic inequities are perpetuated when the focus is on incorporating marginalised groups into outdated economic niches, rather than envisioning educational pathways that genuinely reflect their aspirations and adapt to the future’s evolving demands.
“Training the Tool” vs. Empowering the Learner
The recent study presenting JClic as a vehicle for teaching programming to four adults with intellectual disabilities illustrates a recurring problem in educational interventions: the technology itself often overshadows the human beings it is ostensibly designed to serve. Rather than examining how these learners might develop meaningful, personally relevant skills, the research reads like a product demo. It highlights JClic’s adaptability, ease of use, and the neatness of its pedagogical design—a narrative reminiscent of “research-backed” marketing that tech companies so often employ to justify their tools. The participants—just four individuals—are largely reduced to data points, their personal histories, ambitions, and needs scarcely acknowledged.
This technocratic, tool-centric approach exemplifies a deeper systemic issue. When we centre a piece of software rather than human development, we risk confirming what disabled communities have long critiqued: that the educational pipeline is less about empowering learners and more about validating new products and solutions. Such a framing is particularly jarring in Italy, a nation whose social policies have historically fallen short of ensuring meaningful inclusion for people with disabilities. Within the broader eugenics-friendly traditions of the Global North, this marginalisation is not an aberration, but part of a long, dark lineage of overlooking the most vulnerable. The emphasis on JClic’s flexibility, rather than on the learners’ autonomy, evokes unsettling echoes of past neglect.
In this scenario, the critical question goes unanswered: did these four participants gain anything truly transformative or transferable? We do not see evidence of them acquiring skills that could enrich their independent living, bolster their employability prospects, or strengthen their capacity for self-advocacy. There is scant connection drawn between the tasks they performed and their lived realities. The study provides no insight into whether these participants desired to learn programming, or how these activities might support their future aspirations and cultural contexts. Instead, participants appear as backdrops to the technology’s glowing self-assessment, their human value overshadowed by metrics of JClic’s effectiveness.
Such an approach ultimately reduces education to a one-way transaction in which learners are passive subjects, not active agents in shaping their futures. True educational inclusion demands more than presenting new tools and declaring success. It requires asking what learners want, what barriers they face, and how learning experiences can honour their individual agency. Without this learner-centred perspective, we continue to perpetuate a hollow model of inclusion—one that celebrates gadgets over growth, and productivity over people.
The Declining Vocational Value of Programming
The landscape of programming and software development has shifted dramatically in recent years. Once considered a pathway to stable and well-paying employment, coding is now at the centre of a technological transformation driven by LLMs and automation. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude offer specialised coding environments, allowing users—including those with minimal formal training—to generate functioning code snippets or even complete projects with relatively simple prompts. This wave of automation is not a distant future scenario; it is already here, steadily eroding the traditional value proposition of coding as a stable, long-term career path.
For people with intellectual disabilities, the timing could not be worse. If the goal of teaching them programming skills is to foster competitive employability or sustainable income opportunities, this approach is likely misguided. Whilst it may have once made sense to guide learners toward careers in software development, the current reality is that human programmers are increasingly positioned as project managers, code reviewers, or creative problem-solvers, rather than frontline code producers. Tasks that once demanded hundreds of hours of human labour can now be completed in minutes by automated tools. Entrusting individuals with ID to learn coding at a moment when coding itself faces a profound existential redefinition risks handing them a skill destined for rapid decline in market relevance.
The tragedy here is not that people with ID cannot learn to code—it is that they are being steered into a skill set that may offer diminishing returns. Instead, educational programmes should consider forward-looking alternatives that emphasise capacities and roles that technology cannot easily replicate. Community-based roles, for example, build on personal relationships, understanding of local contexts, and the ability to facilitate social cohesion—attributes AI cannot meaningfully replace. Creative problem-solving likewise demands human insight, adaptability, and moral judgment, qualities that no current automated system genuinely possesses. Advocacy and self-advocacy are additional skill areas where human experience, empathy, and ethical reasoning matter more than any algorithmic shortcut.
Rather than funnelling learners into a tech pipeline that may soon reduce their labour value to near-zero, educators and policymakers should look toward building skill sets that stand resilient against automation’s encroachment. This could mean focusing on transferable skills like communication, critical thinking, or emotional intelligence, as well as encouraging active participation in community life. If we continue to fixate on coding as a vocational golden ticket, we risk leaving people with ID stranded in a future where their hard-earned skills no longer hold currency. Instead, we must cultivate their strengths in areas that will remain uniquely human, ensuring their contributions remain valued, relevant, and respected.
The Danger of Technological Fetishism in Education
In the study, the apparent “success” of JClic takes centre stage, overshadowing what should be the true measure of meaningful educational outcomes: participant empowerment, engagement, and self-determination. By placing the spotlight so squarely on the tool, the research risks sending an insidious message—namely, that the technology’s adaptability and effectiveness are more important than the human beings using it. This is not merely a quirk of one particular study; it reflects a broader, troubling trend in educational discourse, where the marketability and novelty of tools often eclipse the question of whether learners’ aspirations, competencies, and long-term needs are truly met.
This fixation on tools instead of learners has a profound impact on how we conceive of inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities. When the metric of success is whether a given software can impart rote tasks or basic competencies, rather than whether it fosters personal growth, autonomy, or sustainable skills, we fall far short of the kind of education that might lead to meaningful social participation. The very existence of a robust technology does not inherently create equitable conditions for learners with ID. Instead, a technocratic approach reduces individuals to passive recipients of pre-packaged content, their value measured only by their performance within the confines of a particular platform.
Such a mindset underscores the systemic failure to integrate people with ID fully and equitably into society. Rather than developing curricula that respond to their lived realities, interests, and evolving capacities, the system fixates on tool mastery—treating the tool as both the method and the goal. This perverse inversion of priorities sidesteps the question of what these learners might truly need or want. It also ignores the social and structural barriers they face, leaving untouched the deeper inequities that no piece of software can mend.
Ultimately, tools should serve as stepping stones, not destinations. They should complement, not define, the educational journey of learners with ID. Real inclusion demands focusing on how each learner can find their own path toward independence, agency, and valued social roles. When we allow technological fetishism to guide our educational efforts, we forsake the opportunity to honour learners’ full humanity. A genuine commitment to inclusion means employing technology as a supportive asset, not elevating it to the status of central protagonist in the educational narrative.
Rethinking Inclusion and Education
To genuinely re-envision inclusion in education, we must abandon approaches rooted in patriarchal-capitalistic priorities—those that reduce people to their economic potential and cast knowledge as a commodity. Instead, we should embrace matristic values that centre on nurturing, reciprocity, and collective well-being. This shift means prioritising education that fosters creativity, community engagement, and advocacy—capacities firmly anchored in human experience and emotional intelligence, and not so easily replaced by algorithms. By reinforcing these human-centric roles, we create an environment where all learners can develop skills that truly matter: not the rote mastery of tools destined for obsolescence, but the cultivation of personal agency, empathy, and a sense of connectedness with others.
One of the most critical steps is to emphasise autonomy and self-determination as core educational outcomes. Rather than viewing learners as passive recipients of predetermined tasks, we should treat them as full participants in their own growth. This can entail involving them in the planning of their learning pathways, acknowledging their lived experiences, and supporting their long-term aspirations. True education is not a narrow funnel into the labour market; it is a bridge connecting individuals to the broader tapestry of their communities. When learners have room to shape their futures, they are more likely to develop confidence, self-advocacy, and the resilience necessary to navigate life’s complexities.
To achieve this, educators and policymakers must adopt holistic approaches. Instead of building “interventions” around task-specific training—or using technology as a shiny stand-in for genuine human connection—programmes should integrate social, emotional, and cultural dimensions of learning. This might mean partnering with community organisations, encouraging intergenerational mentorship, or creating collaborative projects that foster mutual respect and collective problem-solving. A robust curriculum might include opportunities for learners to explore local histories, take part in creative arts, or engage in environmental stewardship—endeavours that cannot be outsourced to a machine.
In this reframed vision, education becomes a collaborative endeavour that values diversity, listens to learners, and works with them to imagine their futures. By emphasising relationships, human potential, and contexts that celebrate rather than exploit difference, we can move beyond outdated paradigms. Such an approach ensures that education no longer serves as a conveyor belt for disposable skills, but becomes a truly inclusive, life-affirming process that honours the dignity and worth of every individual.
Final thoughts …
We stand at a crossroads, where the choice between perpetuating patriarchal-capitalistic models of “inclusion” or embracing matristic values of care, cooperation, and holistic well-being has never been clearer. Educators, researchers, and policymakers hold immense power in shaping the future of inclusion, and they must wield it responsibly. It is not enough to introduce marginalised groups to whatever skill happens to be in vogue; we must look ahead, proactively designing educational programmes that foster autonomy, creativity, and meaningful social participation. By adopting forward-thinking approaches, we position learners as active co-creators of their futures, rather than confining them to skill sets already edging towards obsolescence.
This commitment requires a radical shift in perspective. Instead of presenting people with intellectual disabilities as mere subjects in a technological “proof of concept,” we should acknowledge their individuality, aspirations, and right to shape their own educational journeys. The recent study surrounding JClic may illustrate the software’s adaptability, but it fails to demonstrate true equity or autonomy for its participants. We must resist such narrow, tool-centric visions and instead champion inclusive education that recognises learners as whole people, shaped by their lived experiences and embedded within rich community networks.
In moving beyond outdated trends and token gestures, we have an opportunity to rewrite the script. Let us design educational experiences that prepare marginalised groups for roles that cannot be rendered obsolete by automation, roles that reflect their humanity and potential. Only by embracing matristic values and prioritising genuine agency can we transform education into a conduit for real equity, empowerment, and lasting inclusion.