When it comes to technology in schools, we seem to be less in Uncanny Valley than some sort of nightmare cave. A school in Salamanca, New York is a humanoid robot as an AI teaching assistant, which supposedly uses ‘natural conversation, facial expressions and real-time interaction to create engaging, hands-on learning experiences.’
Why must a child’s future now be assumed to be digital by default? How can parents enforce healthy boundaries when the very institutions educating our children are normalising constant device use?
‘Sally’ was purchased by the school district for $60,000 from a company called Realbotix, who two years ago acquired Simulacra, a Las Vegas-based company known for making realistic sex dolls. The Black Mirror episodes write themselves nowadays.
Aside from the obvious ethical and safeguarding issues of putting teenagers in front of a lifeless machine, who really thought that this was the best possible use of limited school funds? (I would hazard a guess that the teachers at this school still have to buy their own tissues and pencils.)
It just goes to show how the allure of techno-optimism and the glitzy marketing campaigns of fast-talking Americans continue to be big business: EdTech is estimated to be worth £106 billion globally by 2034. Learning has now become a commercial transaction and childhood a market opportunity: there are now robotic devices to help absent pupils learn from home, virtual reality headsets for interacting with 3D models, and next year in London there will even be the first ‘AI-enabled’ primary school, integrating AI into all aspects of the school curriculum. Only last month, Keir Starmer promised to roll out AI tutors to 450,000 students on free school meals in an attempt to close the attainment gap, literally in the same week the government announced that they wanted to ban AI chatbots for children.
Why must a child’s future now be assumed to be digital by default? How can parents enforce healthy boundaries when the very institutions educating our children are normalising constant device use? Even the Reception Baseline Assessment, a mandatory test for all four- and five-year-olds starting school, is now done on a touchscreen device.
You would think that we would learn from the colossal failure of the iPad fad that children deserve evidence-based education, not expensive digital experiments. In 2013, the Los Angeles School District forked out an incredible $1.3 billion on iPads for every student, teacher and administrator – and yet just two years later the schools were trying to give the iPads back, saying they were nothing more than a costly distraction (who knew?)
Yet schools continue to ride the EdTech bandwagon: in the UK alone we spend £900 million a year (the most in Europe) on gadgety gimmicks – despite the fact that there is little to no evidence that they improve teaching or learning. Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of The Digital Delusion, has reviewed meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of studies. His verdict: ‘In nearly every context, EdTech doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.’
Much has been written about the pedagogical implications of AI in education: how when students hand over their thinking to a machine, they sacrifice their academic integrity, intellectual independence and ability to think critically, trusting algorithms over their own judgement. Schools, exam boards and universities delude themselves with this hopeful fiction that students are curious, self-directed learners who will use technology responsibly if given the right boundaries. The reality is, of course, that students don’t use AI to just brainstorm or refine ideas – they use it unthinkingly to do assignments faster.
Less has been said about how these commercial EdTech platforms are also just not very good. They do little to reduce teacher workload and often rely on different versions of the same gamification elements that make social media so addictive – ‘streaks’, countdown clocks, leaderboards, coins for correct answers – anything to keep kids hunched over going click, click scroll. Despite their glossy PR, these apps flatten the learning process and erode students’ attention spans and tolerance for effort. Take Photomath for example, which has over 300 million downloads: students simply have to snap a photo of an equation and it spits out a solution. Cheating has never been so convenient.
Schools need to worry less about sounding ‘smart’ and ‘forward-thinking’ and instead do what is best for children, not EdTech companies. Learning is fundamentally a social activity – it should involve discussion, debate, disagreement and collaboration. It seems madness to continue to plug children into screens and then wonder why younger generations have no empathy, confidence or interpersonal skills.
My son will not start primary school for a few more years but I fear for his educational future; I fear that by the time he starts secondary school, or maybe even before, there will be a social divide between mass, app-based instruction for the many, and human dialogue and intellectual exchange for the few. I fear that EdTech, with all its promises to ‘democratise’ education and solve problems that may not even be there, may just actually entrench educational inequality further. I fear that if education policymakers don’t look up soon, it may be too late to switch off.
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