The Choice We Keep Making
Still, that doesn’t stop people from trying to sell us the idea that it can. Every time a new technology shows up, the companies who stand to profit from it look at education and see a problem they can solve, because solving it would also make them economically successful, in a market worth a great deal of money. It’s really just Upton Sinclair’s old point. He wrote about efficiency being valued over humanity, looking hard at working conditions in the wake of the industrial revolution. He said it’s hard to get someone to see something clearly when their income depends on not seeing it. So the pitch comes fast, and every time, they tell us this one is different. It never is.
I have two stories from my own career where I chose the sales pitch over the people in the room who actually knew better, buying a company’s promise that a piece of technology would just make things better, and finding out that it didn’t. I think we’re about to make that same mistake with AI too.
Smart boards
If you don’t know what a smart board is, that’s because they were dumb. A smart board was a touchscreen panel mounted over a section of a classroom whiteboard, with a projector bolted above it throwing the image down. It ate up about seventy-five percent of your usable whiteboard space, and it worked maybe a quarter of the time.
At my last school, I went to a conference, got sold, and installed them in every classroom, over the objections of teachers who begged me not to take their whiteboard space away. The bill was over fifty thousand dollars. Within two years, almost every teacher in the building had quietly retreated to the small strip of real whiteboard they had left. I eventually took every one of them down and kept the projectors, which is, of course, what everyone eventually used in classrooms anyway: a whiteboard and a projector.
Much later in my career, I watched one of the most gifted middle school Waldorf science teachers draw by freehand in chalk a cell in more depth and more beauty than I had ever seen in a textbook or on a slide. It made me question whether I needed a projector in the room at all.
