Google and ISTE+ASCD announce new partnership to destroy US education

I have had it with this shit

What is the price of stupidity at scale?

Over the weekend, my friend Greg Toppo of The74 asked me to comment on Google's new hijacking of—er, I mean new partnership with—ISTE+ASCD, an umbrella ed-tech organization, that willl purportedly train every teacher and higher ed faculty in the US to become "AI ready." Toppo’s comprehensive story is here, and I’m quoted at some length.

But, not enough length! With Toppo’s understanding, I am now share with you the full context of my remarks. I have met the enemy, and it is ISTE+ACSD. See you soon-ish at ASU+GSV, Richard, let’s see if you can look me in the eyes!

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It is completely unsurprising, though no less infuriating, that ISTE+ACSD continues to double-down on its leading role as shill for Big Tech.¹ I’m sure it’s nice to unlock Google’s funding, but what so profit an allegedly nonprofit education organization if it shall loseth its soul? All the while doing damage to teacher effectiveness and student learning in the process.

But that of course presumes there’s any soul at ISTE that’s left to be lost, which seems unlikely. Richard Culatta, who worked in the Obama Administration and is someone I once respected, seems blissfully unaware that ‘AI literacy’—a stupid and largely incoherent term, but surely one that if it has any meaning suggests a modicum of critical thinking—might result in teachers resisting these tools of cognitive automation. To be sure, ISTE says resistance is futile, because “the future” will demand “AI readiness.” I’d credit their clairvoyance just a tad more if ISTE had not claimed, as recently as just a few years ago, that “the future” would also demand that everyone learn to code.²

Oops!

If we can bracket the odiousness of ISTE’s grift, I admit I’m fascinated to see the major Big Tech companies competing so vigorously to control “the education market.” OpenAI is giving away their premium model to teachers (until they won’t), and now Google is doing whatever this is.³ Of course, Google is also the company that once ran ads suggesting children should use AI to outsource the drafting of their letters to their heroes, so I confess I’m just a tad skeptical of their commitment to “student agency” and “critical thinking” nowadays. As a company, they’ve tried to erode the former, and shown little collective capacity for the latter.⁴

I also must briefly note the contradictory, and fundamentally very stupid, paradox sitting at the center of the AI hype right now. On the one hand, we are told AI models are on the the verge of ravaging the entire global economy and will soon destroy the need for knowledge work of any sort. That’s bullshit of course, but if it were true, then why in the world would teachers need any training to understand how to “use AI responsibly”? For that matter, why would we even need teachers at all, if AI will obviate the need for any human thought expended toward any productive enterprise? The robots will do all our work for us, as we become robots ourselves.⁵

The good news is that all of this will end up being a waste of teachers’ time and Google’s money and ISTE’s relevance. That’s my prediction about “the future,” and I’m confident in it because I know a thing or two about the science of learning. Human beings have evolved to learn from each other in the context of our relationships. This is the superpower of our species, and the kids who’ve grown up in the past 20 years are increasingly disgusted by what tech has done to them personally, and society more broadly. They are not happy about the world we’ve given them, and their voices are growing ever louder. There’s no hope that Google or ISTE will listen to them, of course.

But their teachers will.

1. I’m-a just gonna call it ISTE in this essay because even that math equation of an acronym is dumb.

2. Remember “prompt engineering”?

3. I stand second to no one in my anti-Anthropic sentiments, but even I can admit their recent ads digging at OpenAI’s plans to incorporate “advertising” into its model were funny as hell. Can’t wait for teachers to prompt “tailor this lesson to a student’s audio learning style” and then receive output that was bought and paid for by some corporate grifter. ISTE, maybe.

4. Sorry not sorry to my friends who work there—might it be time to look for other career options?

5. For the record, even if we assume for the sake of stupid argument that AI robots or whatever will do everything for us in the future, we would of course still need teachers, because our human lives are enhanced dramatically by education, it is an end unto itself, not a f’ing jobs-training program.