“If I finally get into my job, why do I learn AI?” one of my students asked me at the end of the school year.
“I don't know,” I said. “I wonder the same thing about me.”
Students take a break during the summer, but Big Tech actively promotes the brand to schools, selling it to students as “homework peers” and “personal tutors” and to educators as “education assistants” and “work peers” to undermine the entire education field and sends out a sea of mixed messages.
We all have a reason to worry. The eye-opening pace of artificial intelligence infiltrating schools and dominating discourse in education left a battlefield of contradictions in the classroom.
Our fear is not hyperbolic. Schools in Texas and Arizona are already using AI to “teach” educators and children as merely “guides” rather than professionals in the content field.
Last year, one of my seniors said, “You can talk to AI late at night, but you don't email me back until the next morning.”
In May, Luis Von Ahn, CEO of the foreign language education app Duolingo, said, “Teaching with AI is much more scalable than teachers.” Schools exist primarily for childcare. And President Donald Trump's April 23rd executive order calls for the use of AI in schools, claiming that “early exposure” will induce “curiosity and creativity.”
This pressure doesn't just come from the White House. Education websites are not critically embracing AI at a stunning pace. Edotopia is used to highlight resources for teaching literature, history, art, mathematics and science, and instead is dominated by AI “tools” sold to overworked educators who burn out to save time. edtechteacher and Colleague.ai refers to AI as “knowledgeable colleagues” and “friendly peers,” moving from a teacher's specific subject area.
If this is not dizzy enough, if our educators are instructed or forced to use AI in our education, we will be criticized when we do so.
Here's what's really happening in the classroom: Teachers are criticized when a generation outsources their imagination to big technology because they are unable to teach the problem-solving skills they need as their children grow up. No wonder the test scores plummeted, with anxiety and depression rising.
But in shiny AI ads paid for billions of dollars of big technology, as they graduate from school, the classroom is portrayed as a student-centric space involving children in personalized technology that is superior to teachers, as if they were separate school supplies items, like pencil cases on desks.
The kids know that. When I teach grammar, students want to use grammar. When we read a book together they say ChatGpt can summarise it for them in seconds. When teaching part of the writing process, they list dozens of AI apps designed to “write” essays for them. Students can easily admit that they are using AI to use cheats, but they are always receiving messages to use “writing coach”, “debate partner”, and “study buddies”.
It was a difficult battle for educators to make their children love school. It's part of the profession. “Pressing students is our job, and resisting students is our job,” my mentor told me when I was a new teacher. “In the middle,” he continued.
Where is your learning now? Will schools be packaged as schools as video games?
If the educators are not teaching writing, we are told that we are not teaching students how to communicate. They say that if they don't teach reading, they don't teach them how to think critically. If we don't teach them business skills, we are told we are not ready to enter the workforce. Now we are told we are not teaching them AI. A future that is about to steal their work?
At the end of my freshman English class grade, we read Erich Lemarck's novels Everything on the Western Front is quiet. I asked the ninth graders to choose a standout aisle. Many of them chose this: “We are lonely as children, we are experienced like old men. We are crude, sad and superficial. I think we are lost.”
They realized the alienation that soldiers felt from themselves. I wondered how it felt – I was estranged from myself. Ironically, their findings presented the overall point of reading literature to better understand themselves and the world and to enhance their ability to empathize and compassion. As my mentor teacher told me decades ago, there is learning there.
Our children become soldiers caught up in the forefront of the fight for education, stuck in big technology and school crossfires. The classroom is a sacred space that prioritizes human learning, discovery and academic risk-taking, and is the flashpoint in America, with children at the heart of it.
I recently finished reading Backbackthe sequel to Remarque Everything on the Western Front is quiet. The novel dramatically depicts the ongoing alienation of soldiers after they return from the war.
“Why can't the kids entertain the years left for them,” said Willie, one of the soldiers, “Do they need them if they don't know anything about it yet?”
Will the classroom remain the battlefield of torches like my students read? Everything on the Western Front is quiet – Children hunting in our school trench while adults fight over the erosion of education? When they come to know who they are, will they be further separated from themselves? – Grand Haven Tribune, Michigan/Tribune News Service
