Back to School Talk (Obligatory)
[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along with a fair amount of sponsored content and affiliate marketing. ("You're Probably Wearing Your Backpack Wrong" in The Wirecutter, for example. And yes, sure, school backpacks are ed-tech.)
I confess, I do think it’s mildly amusing to imagine the editors who planned a slew of articles full of generic AI-boosterism for late August publication – the “it's inevitable," "we must prepare students for the workplace of tomorrow" sort of bullshit – only to have ChatGPT5 come along and poke a leak in the hype-balloon. It's likely to be a slow leak, and I'm sad to say we’ll probably still have to hear about “AI” for a while. No sudden onset of winter like in The Day After Tomorrow, trapping us in the digital library with only predictive tokens to burn.
And I’m sure there will still be plenty of ed-tech evangelists – you know the ones who've rebranded themselves in recent months as "AI" evangelists – who'll refuse to admit that the promises they've been making about LLMs have been wildly inflated. They’ve got consulting contracts and speaking gigs to maintain. They’ve got startups to sell, and the sycophancy machine continues to assure them – they'll spring for that friendlier, legacy model – they’re very clever. There'll be a fair number of the cheer squad too who, if the winds have truly changed (fingers crossed), will act as though they've been booing at "AI" all along. And the rest will hope that everyone forgets how loudly they lauded teaching machines. As ed-tech amnesia is real and widespread and there are rarely any consequences for ed-tech disasters, this silence seems like a good bet – surely a much better bet than insisting “AGI is imminent” or (LOL) “AGI has been achieved internally.”
So many schools, so many organizations, so many powerful people have invested a lot – literally, figuratively – in this dangerous future of automated teaching and thinking, and as such, a lot of folks want to kick off the new academic year with the plan they made when they signed contracts with OpenAI or with Google back in May: onward, pretending as everything is business-as-usual.
Over the summer months, several teachers have asked me for suggestions of what they should say on their syllabi about AI, of what students should read on the topic. I have both a ton of suggestions and also nothing to say, in part because I don't know enough about the specifics of school, the context, the course, the students. And all of this [this is me, waving my arms around wildly] calls for much more than a blurb on the first-day-of-class handout.
