Kids at a private grade school in Texas are being taught by AIs instead of teachers.
This “innovative approach,” according to an article last week in Newsweek, gives students a day’s worth of content in two hours via personalized games and exercises on their laptops, like clicking on colored dots to solve logic games. Upbeat pop music plays in the background.
Staff serve as “guides” rather than teachers. Afternoons are spent working on “non-academic critical” skills like public speaking or bike riding.
Some kids are so thrilled with the program that they want to open a high school so they can continue without teachers or any of the traditional trappings of the educational system.
Oh, and almost half of them work at SpaceX.
What problem is this program fixing?
It’s hard to tell, based on at least one article, of course, but the founder of the school’s program cited her daughter who said “School is so boring.” It turns out that a teacher “in front of a classroom” could no longer address the unique needs of each student.
Video games are more fun.
Wrap that observation with some blather about “one-to-one, mastery-based tutoring experience” and you get a company behind the school that is happy to publicize its aggressive roll-out plan and keep it management and funders secret.
I think the program, however unwittingly, is intended to teach kids how to obey their machines, which is in keeping with Google’s recent announcement that it will make its Gemini AI apps available to “children under 13.”
Obedience requires that kids get acclimated to relying on AI for information and trusting the guidance they are given. It also means learning to prioritize that interaction above all others, since a machine will always know you better than any human being could. Their relationships at school with be with machines, at least the relationships that engage them most (and most deeply).
It’s not about learning how things work…but learning to let things work them. Users being used.
School is boring? The answer can’t be attaching kids to AIs and demoting teachers to “primarily provide motivational and emotion support.”
Unless we want to train a generation of kids how to jump when AI says so.
