Liz Shulman: Will Big Tech transform school into an AI video game?

Chicago Tribune

20 hours ago

'Why am I learning AI if it's going to eventually take my job?' 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 mine.'
Students are off for the summer, but Big Tech is working hard pitching its brand to schools, marketing its products to students as 'homework buddies' and 'personal tutors' and to educators as 'teaching assistants' and 'work pals' while undermining the entire field of education and sending out a sea of mixed messages.
We all have reason to worry. The dizzying pace at which artificial intelligence has infiltrated schools and dominated the discourse within education has left the classroom a battleground of contradictions.
Our fears aren't hyperbolic. Schools in Texas and Arizona are already using AI to 'teach' kids with educators as mere 'guides' rather than experts in their content area.
Last year, one of my seniors told me she preferred AI to her teachers 'because I can talk to AI in the middle of the night, but my teachers don't email me back until the next morning.'
In May, Luis von Ahn, CEO of the foreign language education app Duolingo, said: 'It's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.' Schools will exist mostly just for child care. And President Donald Trump's April 23 executive order calls for the use of AI in schools, claiming the 'early exposure' will spark 'curiosity and creativity.'
This pressure isn't only coming from the White House. Education websites have uncritically embraced AI at a stunning pace. Edutopia used to highlight resources for teaching literature, history, art, math and science and instead is dominated now by AI 'tools' marketed to burned-out, overworked educators to save time. EdTechTeacher and Colleague.AI call AI 'knowledgeable colleagues' and 'friendly buddies,' shifting away from teachers' specific subject areas.
If this isn't dizzying enough, when we educators are directed or forced to use AI in our teaching, we're criticized when we do.
What's really happening in the classroom is this: Teachers are unable to teach the problem-solving skills kids will need as they grow up and are blamed when an entire generation is outsourcing their imaginations to Big Tech. No wonder test scores have plunged, and anxiety and depression have risen.
Yet in glossy AI advertisements paid with the billions of dollars Big Tech is making off schools, the classroom is portrayed as student-centered spaces where kids engage with personalized technology that differentiates better than teachers as though it's just another school supply item like the pencil cases on their desks.
The kids know it. When I teach grammar, students want to use Grammarly. When we read a book together, they say ChatGPT can summarize it for them in seconds. When I teach them any part of the writing process, they list the dozens of AI apps that are designed to 'write' the essay for them. Students readily admit they use AI to cheat, but they're constantly getting messages to use their 'writing coach,' 'debate-partner' and 'study buddy.'
It's always been an uphill battle for educators to get kids to like school. It's part of the profession. 'It's our job to push students, and it's our students' job to resist,' a mentor told me when I was a new teacher. 'In the middle,' he continued, 'therein lies learning.'
Wherein lies learning now? Will school become a video game packaged as, well, school?
If educators don't teach writing, we're told we're not teaching students how to communicate. If we don't teach reading, we're told we're not teaching them how to think critically. If we don't teach them business skills, we're told we're not preparing them to enter the workforce. Now we're being told if we don't teach them AI, we're not preparing them for their future that consists of what, exactly? The future that's poised to steal their jobs?
At the end of the school year in my freshman English class, we read Erich Remarque's novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' I asked my ninth graders to choose passages that stood out to them. Many of them chose this one: 'We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men. We are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost.'
They noticed the alienation the soldiers feel from themselves. I wondered if it's how they felt, too — estranged from their own selves. Ironically, their discovery showed the whole point of reading literature — to understand oneself and the world better and to increase one's capacity for empathy and compassion. As my mentor teacher told me decades ago, therein lies learning.
Our kids have become soldiers caught on the front lines in the battle for education, stuck in the crossfire of Big Tech and school. The classroom — a sacred space that should prioritize human learning, discovery and academic risk-taking — has become a flashpoint in America, and our kids are in the center of it.
I recently finished reading 'The Road Back,' Remarque's sequel to 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' The novel dramatizes the ongoing alienation of the soldiers once they've returned home from war.
'Why can't you let the kids enjoy the few years that are left to them,' Willy, one of the soldiers pleads, 'while they need still know nothing about it?'
Is the classroom going to remain a torched battleground such as the one my students read about in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' — kids hunkering in the trenches of our schools while the adults fight over the eroded terrain of education? Will they become even more cut off from their own selves, just when they're getting to know who they are?