In 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would be joining the National Science Foundation and Gates Foundations in spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support the development of technologies for “personalized learning.” These technologies promise to provide learners or users with interactive content that is tailored with precision to their preferences and previous behaviors—much like Facebook’s newsfeed does. And also like Facebook, they accomplish this by using “big data” and “analytics,” recordings of clicking, scrolling and typing of many thousands of users. However, analytics experts, sociologists of technology and most recently, former Facebook and Google executives understand these techniques as ultimately representing a sophisticated and highly effective form of Skinnerian operant conditioning—one that customizes schedules of reinforcement precisely to users’ or learners’ behavioral patterns. First explaining how this “new behaviorism” is instantiated in personalized learning design and technology, this paper then argues that such an approach is antithetical to the most basic priorities and purposes of education: Namely, to cultivate in students a sense of ownership in their own learning, and responsibility for their own behavior and its effects on others.