What has Big Tech ever really done for schools?
Perhaps you recall how some years ago Big Tech was proclaiming that computer programming should be taught in high schools everywhere. Not only would that train and develop young minds in the best possible ways, it would prepare them for lucrative career choices galore. That hasn’t happened.
Big Tech has been forcing their products, always hyped as saviors, into schools pretty much from the beginning. Yet test scores have stayed stagnant. Standardized tests don’t really mean shit except as indicators of a kid’s family income, but they’re what the “failing schools” crowd relies on, so we’re well within our rights to point out that by their own measure Big Tech has been failing our schools. And now they’re looking to shove artificial “intelligence” into education in every way that they think they can.
Real learning, as the renowned psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed, is a social process. It happens through dialogue, relationships, and shared meaning-making. Learning unfolds in what Vygotsky called the Zone of Proximal Development — that space between what a learner can do alone and what they can achieve with the guidance of a more experienced teacher, peer, or mentor — someone who can respond with care, ask the right question, and scaffold the next step.
AI can’t do that.
It can’t sense when a student’s silence means confusion or when it means trauma. It can’t notice a spark in a student’s eyes when they connect a concept to their lived experience. It can’t see the brilliance behind a messy, not fully developed idea, or the potential in an unconventional voice. It cannot build a beloved community.
(Truthout)
As a matter of fact there’s already growing evidence that AI will primarily hurt, not help. How can you not find the vast, shameless greed and arrogance of the tech broligarchy to be absolutely infuriating? To each their own, I guess, but that’s what it does to me.
The only thing that will get every kid a great education is ENDING POVERTY. Not charters or vouchers or “privatization”, and sure as hell not all the tech in the world.
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