AI in schools – The choice we keep making

Every time a new technology arrives, it finds its way into education, and every time, we are handed the same choice: listen to the people trying to sell it to us, or listen to teachers.

We’ve done this before. In the 1950s and 60s, television was going to be the answer. School districts wired classrooms for broadcast so a single “master teacher” could deliver a lesson to hundreds of classrooms at once. It was pitched exactly the way every new education technology gets pitched: as a way to reach more kids, more consistently, for less money. It didn’t hold up. A kid watching a screen is not the same as a kid in a room with an adult who knows them.