Life on Mars: Platform education and sacrificial pedagogy as a diagnostic of schooling on earth

This paper uses the speculative scenario of educating children on Mars as a philosophical heuristic for interrogating the ethical limits of contemporary education systems on Earth. It argues that platform-mediated schooling can reconstitute educational commitment as conditional investment, where attention is allocated by anticipated contribution and withdrawn when projection weakens. The paper develops the concept of sacrificial pedagogy, in which learners are provisionally valued while they perform as expected, but are subsequently abandoned, marginalised, or rendered disposable when they no longer align with institutional or technological ideals of success, to name this recalibration of obligation, and uses an imaginary of schooling on Mars to make its logic visible. Selected works of speculative fiction (Ender’s Game, Flowers for Algernon, and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8) function as philosophical resources that intensify judgement, rather than as illustrative examples. The analysis provides a criterion for educational legitimacy, which is that education cannot treat predicted value as a warrant for withdrawing obligation without ceasing to be what we would truly recognise as education, as education requires sustained ethical obligation to learners as developing persons, regardless of predicted value.