I enjoyed this very much. You've challenged my thinking in many ways.
However, as a former HS English teacher and now as a community college professor, I think there is a piece missing in the "AI in Education" narrative. For many of our students, writing is a chore. When I need to move a load of dirt, which I consider a chore, I use a wheelbarrow (a tool). I think our students see writing and AI in the same way. I see little discussion around the perception of writing inside the "AI in Education" narrative, and to me it is the central concern. As a society, we collectively have taught students to hate reading and writing. We're going to need to address that fact before the tool (AI) goes away. Re-centering the focus of education on "Love of Learning" and not on "Knowledge Acquisition" would go a long way.
The TESCREAL crowd are actual sociopaths looking to dress their sociopathy up in such a way as to make it look like it’s not sociopathic. Spoilers: they are all terrible humans who believe(?) terrible things, or at least say they believe terrible things in order to assuage any lingering whispers of guilt they might experience due to being terrible people. The worst thing is that they have billions and billions and billions of dollars and a proven track record of, as you’ve pointed out, just unleashing tech without any concern with consequences. Raaaaah.
Homeschool mama here. The purposes of my child's education are: to love learning, become who she's designed to be/meant to be/wants to be, and contribute to community in positive ways.
One note on footnote 1: I think Team TESCREAL is actually a much greater threat than Christian Nationalists, because the 2025 Project is just an American concern, while e/acc et al. are international. Indeed, creating a unified global society toward maximum efficiency capitalist ends is an explicitly stated goal (see, for instance, Marc Andreesen’s manifesto.) Team TESCREAL also has more actual power than any group of American Christian Nationalists, exactly because the organizations they’re aligned with are multinational corporations.
As an American citizen who has lived in another country for over a decade, I have seen some of this start to play out already, with globalists trying to usurp local, in-person education with an everything-is-online model.
I'm likewise flabbergasted by the intentional parallels drawn with Brave New World. Forget about what this says about our vision for education, what does this say about the life we want for ourselves and our students more broadly?
I think you're right that education has become largely market based but I don't think I read that argument quite as cynically as you. If I try to see the world from the point of view of those who may hold that view, I think they would argue that the purpose of education is to equip students with the skills needed to excel in the marketplace. Toward this end, extrinsic competitive motivators like grades and rankings help motivate students to achieve those goals. The arguments for traditional grading are similar.
I disagree with this take, but I can at least see some consistency in their train of thought. Whether or not you think that this is a reasonable mission statement for our education system is fundamentally about what you believe a good life looks like. If it's competing in the marketplace to "make a dent" in the universe and to build a life of material wealth, then focusing on the acquisition of technical skills has at least some merit. If the purpose of education is something closer to helping students to foster a flourishing life built on virtue and character, your education system will look very different. In that frame of mind, it's much more about building personal habits that will help you to build a curious craft, whatever your career ends up looking like.
The point where folks like you and I split paths with the competitive framing of education is much further upstream than our disagreement about the purpose of education itself. We have fundamentally different perspectives on what a good life looks like.
I'll be curious to hear what you think about the piece I've got in the works for this week. Lots of similar ideas, although my spur was the recent Yuval Noah Harari interview on Colbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w37ty9gGU8 where he says that "nobody knows what to teach our kids that will be relevant in twenty years." I'll just let you imagine how that landed with me :)
Did everyone forget about the disaster that online learning was? Remember how we discovered that we need teachers over tech to personalize and/or teach literally anything?
Hello John. Thank you for sharing this angle on AI in education. I wonder if the AI will be like introducing calculators in my grade school and the uproar about how "kids can't do math anymore" or will it be like the paintbrushes and oil paints that opened my imagination and made me start to notice details in nature (the veins in a leaf)? I don't know. But we do need all sides of this conversation, so thank you for gathering us.
In response to your question for us about the purpose of education, may I share the words from a magazine clip out that I have had long stuck into the corner of the frame of my degree: "The purpose of education is to reduce the seduction of eloquence." (I don't have the name, but do believe this was from Cornel West.)
I wrote a similar critique of Michael Smith’s “The Abundant University.” We should team up and pitch a coauthored piece to The Chronicle or NY Times. https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/michael-d-smiths-false-prophecy-for-higher-ed
I enjoyed this very much. You've challenged my thinking in many ways.
However, as a former HS English teacher and now as a community college professor, I think there is a piece missing in the "AI in Education" narrative. For many of our students, writing is a chore. When I need to move a load of dirt, which I consider a chore, I use a wheelbarrow (a tool). I think our students see writing and AI in the same way. I see little discussion around the perception of writing inside the "AI in Education" narrative, and to me it is the central concern. As a society, we collectively have taught students to hate reading and writing. We're going to need to address that fact before the tool (AI) goes away. Re-centering the focus of education on "Love of Learning" and not on "Knowledge Acquisition" would go a long way.
The TESCREAL crowd are actual sociopaths looking to dress their sociopathy up in such a way as to make it look like it’s not sociopathic. Spoilers: they are all terrible humans who believe(?) terrible things, or at least say they believe terrible things in order to assuage any lingering whispers of guilt they might experience due to being terrible people. The worst thing is that they have billions and billions and billions of dollars and a proven track record of, as you’ve pointed out, just unleashing tech without any concern with consequences. Raaaaah.
Homeschool mama here. The purposes of my child's education are: to love learning, become who she's designed to be/meant to be/wants to be, and contribute to community in positive ways.
Interesting piece. Thank you for writing this.
One note on footnote 1: I think Team TESCREAL is actually a much greater threat than Christian Nationalists, because the 2025 Project is just an American concern, while e/acc et al. are international. Indeed, creating a unified global society toward maximum efficiency capitalist ends is an explicitly stated goal (see, for instance, Marc Andreesen’s manifesto.) Team TESCREAL also has more actual power than any group of American Christian Nationalists, exactly because the organizations they’re aligned with are multinational corporations.
As an American citizen who has lived in another country for over a decade, I have seen some of this start to play out already, with globalists trying to usurp local, in-person education with an everything-is-online model.
I'm likewise flabbergasted by the intentional parallels drawn with Brave New World. Forget about what this says about our vision for education, what does this say about the life we want for ourselves and our students more broadly?
I think you're right that education has become largely market based but I don't think I read that argument quite as cynically as you. If I try to see the world from the point of view of those who may hold that view, I think they would argue that the purpose of education is to equip students with the skills needed to excel in the marketplace. Toward this end, extrinsic competitive motivators like grades and rankings help motivate students to achieve those goals. The arguments for traditional grading are similar.
I disagree with this take, but I can at least see some consistency in their train of thought. Whether or not you think that this is a reasonable mission statement for our education system is fundamentally about what you believe a good life looks like. If it's competing in the marketplace to "make a dent" in the universe and to build a life of material wealth, then focusing on the acquisition of technical skills has at least some merit. If the purpose of education is something closer to helping students to foster a flourishing life built on virtue and character, your education system will look very different. In that frame of mind, it's much more about building personal habits that will help you to build a curious craft, whatever your career ends up looking like.
The point where folks like you and I split paths with the competitive framing of education is much further upstream than our disagreement about the purpose of education itself. We have fundamentally different perspectives on what a good life looks like.
I'll be curious to hear what you think about the piece I've got in the works for this week. Lots of similar ideas, although my spur was the recent Yuval Noah Harari interview on Colbert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w37ty9gGU8 where he says that "nobody knows what to teach our kids that will be relevant in twenty years." I'll just let you imagine how that landed with me :)
Thanks for this post. Maybe I missed this in an earlier post, but do you have a pub date set for the new book yet? Looking forward to reading more.
Did everyone forget about the disaster that online learning was? Remember how we discovered that we need teachers over tech to personalize and/or teach literally anything?
Hello John. Thank you for sharing this angle on AI in education. I wonder if the AI will be like introducing calculators in my grade school and the uproar about how "kids can't do math anymore" or will it be like the paintbrushes and oil paints that opened my imagination and made me start to notice details in nature (the veins in a leaf)? I don't know. But we do need all sides of this conversation, so thank you for gathering us.
In response to your question for us about the purpose of education, may I share the words from a magazine clip out that I have had long stuck into the corner of the frame of my degree: "The purpose of education is to reduce the seduction of eloquence." (I don't have the name, but do believe this was from Cornel West.)