Oh No! AI Has Arrived in Education: Educators' Misplaced Faith in Technology Again

 "...Thoreau questioned our faith in technology. First and foremost, the lives of workers in Thoreau's time, as in ours, were often forced to conform to a mechanical process, not an organic one. Machine work meant machinelike lives." John Kaag & Jonathan Van Belle, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living

Educators seem to have an "unending faith" that the gods of Silicon Valley are going to deliver to them the one magical device-tool-software-hardware that will deliver achievement results for students. As a teacher in mid-1995, I remember that the Internet was the educational promise land, where our students have at their fingertips all knowledge and learning. We opened the cyber doorways wide and brought forth this new digital world, only to discover that it had its less-than-desirable places and people. There was then a scramble to try control access through new devices and new software, clearly a boon for the tech industry but an added expense in the education budget. No one seemed to question the faith in technology.

Over the years of my career as an educator, new technologies have been invented and peddled to the schools, and in the mid 2000s, the tech industry successfully convinced the entire educational institutional establishment that schools needed to invest even more in technology in order to "stay relevant" as they called it. For example, school leaders were told to get a Twitter-Facebook account in order to connect and be a part of the twenty-first century. I even bought that blather myself. Then, through the mid-2010s, social media began to fail in its promise to "connect others" by dividing us more than ever, spewing so much misinformation, so that today, we are so polarized we might never be able to unite as a country. Somehow calling Twitter "X" seems appropriate now, for it and Facebook have been left to continue poisoning discourse and people's minds.

Next came the "one-to-one" efforts to get a "device in the hands of every student." I again bought that story from Silicon Valley as well. If students only have a device then they will be able to learn. We're about ten years into that with little to show for it. Those who were learning are still learning, and those who struggled are still struggling. It would seem that it is not the technology that matters.

Perhaps the whole problem with our 21st century education is that we have this misplaced faith in technology. I am not writing some Kaczynski diatribe here where all technology is evil, but I see this faith alive again with all the professional development and books talking about the promise of Artificial Intelligence or AI. The educational tech gurus and consultants have been converted and are proclaiming the "Promise of AI" in bringing about student learning. No seems to be questioning this faith in another technology.

John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle (2023),  point out that in writer Henry David Thoreau's time, the faith in technology was equally strong. But Thoreau was not as enthralled, because the "machines of the time" required workers to "conform to mechanical processes." Work lost its organic quality and workers engaged in "machinelike lives." Maybe that's the issue with all this tech in our classrooms...learning is no longer an organic process of growth, but a machinelike process that students are subjected to. Teaching and learning have become work that is machinelike making the lives of both students and teachers lifeless and mechanical.

Kaag and Van Belle (2023) write:

"When we idealize the mechanical, it often comes at the cost of dehumanizing workers; laborers have 'no time to be anything but a machine ,' Thoreau complains. There is no time, no energy, no strength left to reflect on higher goals and act meaningfully toward them." (p. 61)

As educators, why we continue to idolize technology disturbs me. It has failed in its promises time and again. What's worse, I think it has in some ways "dehumanized" and continues to "dehumanize" both teaching and learning. Teachers are expected to "produce results" like machines. Students are expected to "produce test scores" like machines. No one has the time to engage in "reflection on the higher goals of life" and act in a "meaningful manner" to obtain them. There is no longer any time to learn about those higher things in the universe that matter a great deal more.

Kaag, John & Van Belle, Jonathan (2023), Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.