A Technology of Unlearning

It's a saying that appears in multiple iterations across multiple slide decks and cited in multiple books, all extolling some sort of highly technological future of education: something about the need to constantly be learning, relearning, unlearning.

I roll my eyes whenever I see this, particularly when it’s incorrectly attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler. It’s not something he wrote, or not exactly -- but that's just part of the reason why its repeated invocation irks me to no end.

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Toffler did assert in his bestselling Future Shock that knowledge was increasingly "perishable," that "today's 'fact' becomes tomorrow's 'misinformation." Students do not need to learn specific things anymore as much as they needed to learn how to learn, he argued.

And maybe this sounds good to you -- cliches like this are incredibly common, and sadly quite appealing to a certain group of people, no doubt because they bypass all the complexities of how learning actually works. “Learning” in this Toffler-esque bromide is reduced to a Kenny Rogers' lyric -- "you've got to know when to hold 'em / know when to fold 'em / know when to walk away / and know when to run" -- and too many folks, vaguely familiar with the tune, will just smile and hums along.

"By instructing students how to learn, unlearn, and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education” -- those are Toffler’s actual words in Future Shock. And in the next paragraph, he cites psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."

The tomorrow that Gerjuoy and Toffler were gesturing towards is really not our tomorrow, or even the tomorrows of the twenty-first century that now lie in the past. First published in 1970, Future Shock still had decades of tomorrows in the twentieth century to imagine and invent and fret over. Toffler coined the phrase “future shock” -- “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” -- even earlier, in 1965. That some pundits and meme-makers still fixate on this particular narrative, one that is now at least fifty years old, that they still cite (and mis-cite) Toffler as an augur of the future should serve to remind us how much of this “futurist” imagination remains firmly stuck in the past.

But there's something not just antiquated but sinister about the calls these days for everyone to embrace "unlearning," particularly when they're connected to full-throated praise for "AI.” “AI” may be one of the biggest threats to teaching and learning, to epistemology and pedagogy that society has ever faced.

I heard someone say this past week that "AI" will force us to "unlearn everything." Indeed, perhaps that is the goal. But to be clear, this is not some sort of effort that strengthens our abilities to know and understand ourselves and the world around us. Rather, this “unlearning” of “AI” involves cognitive surrender and cognitive atrophy. It involves dependence and perhaps even (if you accept this medical and moral framework) addiction. It involves the monopolistic control and, so damningly, the erasure of knowledges.

Toffler’s call for an education system that prioritized learning, relearning, and unlearning was meant to prepare students for a world of unpredictability and precarity. (Instead of, say, creating not only a school system, but a whole society in which their dignity and safety could be more assured.) “The present curriculum is a mindless holdover from the past,” Toffler asserted. (Why study English or algebra, he argued, when we should be teaching cadres of young people how to live in submarine communities or in outer space? Why indeed.)

For the past fifty years (at least), people have been demanding that education reorient itself towards “the future” -- a particular kind of future, no doubt, one full of gizmos and gadgets and cliches about speed and innovation, one where meaning is only in data and markets and money. Of course schools have always been bound to the future -- to suggest otherwise is to ignore all the practices and rituals that constantly mark beginnings and endings and the passage of time, that promise and caution about “what’s next”: the next chapter, the next test, the next grade, the next school and so on.

To call for a future in which “AI” demands “unlearning” is to unmoor everyone from time and place and body -- who we were, who we are, who we can become. To embrace its version of “unlearning” is to surrender all learning (all agency, all accountability) -- about yourself and the world to someone else’s algorithm. The constant “unlearning” that “AI” demands is actually the foreclosure of any future where learning is possible at all.

A Technology of Unlearning

“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” by Emanuel Maiberg from 404 Media. The production of this technology quite literally involves the destruction of knowledge.

Also from 404 Media: “Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing” by Jason Koebler.

“Does AI stop children from learning?” asks The Economist, and while the research cited sure points to “yes” the article still ends with pablum about “using the technology correctly.” Because The Economist, I suppose.

“Data Centers are a Public Education Issue” writes Jennifer Berkshire.

“Texas Tech is using A.I. to cut left-leaning content in its curriculum,” The New York Times reports. Again, "AI" is a technology that prevents learning, and those who embrace it know that.

“5 Ways AI Is Cutting Into Students’ Ability to Learn” -- The 74 on the latest survey data from Common Sense Media.

High Tech Disaster Movie

It’s been, what, four years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT? And now, now, “OpenAI Introduces ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ as Safety Concerns Grow.”

“Google Turns On Gemini A.I. for Students Using Its Classroom App,” Natasha Singer reports in The New York Times.

“Meta’s Big Reckoning Is Here,” says Wired, on the “landmark case that could force signficant changes to core features of Facebook and Instagram.”

Ed-Tech is Still “Cop Shit”

“Black & Brown kids need an AI moratorium” writes Kaliris Salas-Ramirez in the NY Daily News. Meanwhile, in Australia: “Why alternative schools are not rushing to bring AI into classrooms.”

The FCC is seeking comments on whether to end the E-Rate program, which gives eligible (read: low income) schools and libraries a discount on Internet services.

The AP recently reported that ICE officers would be equipped with gloves that administer painful electric shocks. Turns out, school cops will get these too: “Omaha police unveil shock gloves for school resource officers.”

I hardly know where to begin to write about Jason Arday, even though I have not stopped thinking about him all week -- about the ways in which, well before this latest onslaught of “AI”-related epistemic violence, there were powerful forces both inside and outside of academia that worked incredibly hard to silence and destroy people.

Lots of things smart things and my god a lot of truly awful things have been written about Arday this week. I’ll just link to this one: Lauren Michele Jackson on “The Real Meaning of the Jason Arday Scandal.”

Today’s bird is the Tennessee Warbler, which my Merlin app tells me is “heading my way soon” – fall migration. You can sort of feel the shift in seasons in the air (fingers crossed) -- but maybe that’s just my mood at the end of my birthday week. (I’ll write more about that in my personal newsletter tomorrow or Monday.)

The Tennessee warbler breeds in the north-eastern parts of the US and Canada before heading south to Central America and the Caribbean for the winter. A “dainty” bird, according to the Cornell bird lab, it’s not a particularly colorful warbler – kinda gray; females a little yellowish. Nor does this bird have anything to do with Tennessee, but hey, that’s the name Alexander Wilson gave the bird back in 1832 and no one seems willing to unlearn that.

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