Move Slow, Remake Things
In the prologue to their book Tinkering Toward Utopia, historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban highlight the tensions in how Americans think about schooling: we have, almost since the nation’s outset, believed in the transformative power of education; and yet, despite the importance we grant to education and our reliance on “educational opportunity,” the practices and institutions of education themselves can feel remarkably unresponsive to these pressures. Or at least, education seems to move so slowly to meet the various goals that all this transformation demands.
“Schools must change!” This critique has a long long history, one that in the last few decades has pushed to completely reorient education around economic policy – schools' goals should be industrial and individualistic goals – and away from any other purposes these institutions might have, particularly those related to other public, democratic values.
“Change,” Tyack and Cuban remind us, “is not synonymous with progress.” And we might instead view schools’ reluctance to change, they contend, as a kind of strength not only a weakness.
Although policy talk about reform has had a utopian ring, actual reforms have typically been gradual and incremental -- tinkering with the system. It may be fashionable to decry such change as piecemeal and inadequate, but over long periods of time such revisions of practice, adapted to local contexts, can substantially improve schools. Rather than seeing the hybridizing of reform ideas as a fault, we suggest it can be a virtue. Tinkering is one way of preserving what is valuable and reworking what is not.
All this "tinkering" can seem frustrating, no doubt, particularly as there are so many ways schools could and should do better for students, teachers, communities.
But one might ask too: what does "revolution" actually look like in education? Who actually benefits from upheaval? Who is harmed?
When it comes to education technology in particular, communities in and around schools seem to be asking these questions with their own sense of urgency for a different kind of change. Indeed, one might see the pushback against ed-tech -- against “screens,” against social media, against “AI” -- as a recognition by teachers and students and parents alike that, in recent decades at least, schools have strayed too far from the gradual and the incremental -- in rhetoric, in policy, in practice. Something radical, something radically unsettling, has happened, and the kind of rapid “innovation” lauded by Silicon Valley may be to blame. All this change, again, as Tyack and Cuban wrote, is “not synonymous with progress.”
"Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said, decreeing a motto not just for Facebook but for the tech sector writ large. But it’s our children, people now worry, who these technologies seem to be breaking. Our children; their futures; all our futures, really. Our growth. Our worth. Our democracy. Our very lives, not just tomorrow but here and now today.
The tech industry’s push for change -- for innovation, speed, efficiency, privatization, market control -- was supposedly utopian. (I’d argue you always had to squint to see it as such; but others seem to have been swayed by the shiny promises of silicon.) Computers in the classroom were supposed to make people better, smarter, "more connected." Industry executives, engineers, investors, evangelists were clear there’d be no "tinkering towards utopia” either -- this was a a ram-it-down-your-throat with billions in venture capital and philanthropic funding sort of effort. It’s obviously wildly dystopian now (obvious, except, of course, to those who refuse to see or care, those whose investments -- financial and/or reputational -- have them clinging to some fantasy that the moral arc of Silicon Valley isn’t bending towards fascism).
Tyack and Cuban’s book was first published in 1995, when Mark Zuckerberg was only 11. So perhaps their argument about “tinkering” no longer applies now that the most powerful and wealthy (and anti-democratic) forces have opted to apply the “move fast and break things” mantra to everything. It has been the tech industry after all, directly and indirectly, that has shaped much the “change” that’s been forced upon schools in recent years. The tech industry has funded, directly and indirectly, almost all aspects of education reform. (Natasha Singer’s new excellent book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools chronicles one aspect this in some detail when it comes to the industry's push for computer science curriculum.) Charter schools. Standard testing on computers, and thus a computer for every student. Personalized learning. Surveillance systems inside and outside the classroom. Online education. Learning management systems. Plagiarism detection. And now, automated everything.
Perhaps it’s not that Tyack and Cuban’s “tinkering” framework is wrong per se. But rather, with a nod to that famous quotation from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, we can suddenly see how the culmination of decades of tech industry meddling and tinkering have upended the mission and practices of education:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
In Larry Cuban’s other (arguably more famous) book Oversold and Underused, the Stanford historian declared that, while computers were already fairly ubiquitous, they had changed very little about teaching and learning. And in the decades since that book was published, one could still argue that ed-tech has still not lived up to all the hype.
But it has changed education – that seems undeniable.
Sure, I suppose, you could blame teachers and students for not using computer correctly that ed-tech's promises remain unfulfilled. You could continue to insist that the future will inevitably be more technological, and that schools must continue to buy these products, must continue to change -- and must change in the direction that the tech industry demands to meet the needs of a future that the tech industry imagines for itself.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” – Wendell Berry
This growing rejection and refusal of technology – inside and outside of schools – is about much much more than the technology itself. It is, in part, about the loss of control; the loss of agency, autonomy, and privacy. It is a response to the oligarchs’ efforts to undermine democracy. It is about these billionaires’ dismal, dystopian vision for the future – a wanton destruction of the planet writ large and local communities writ small; their apparent hatred for home and humanity alike.
The news from the New York City and Los Angeles School Districts this week, restricting the use of “AI” in the classroom is a “win,” even if there is still much work to do to reorient education away from the tech industry’s products (and as importantly, its values). The news this week reflects much more tinkering with policy, arguably, than a reversal or upheaval -- we’re back in Tyack and Cuban land again, perhaps. (No one in either district is “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” and there are so many loopholes that allow tech companies to claim that they’re the exceptions that must be saved.)
But it’s a win. It’s a win for democracy -- for all the teachers and parents and students who said to district leaders that moving fast with “AI” was going to break things, break people; who asked that their needs be met, their voices be heard over the needs and voices of vendors.
There is still work to do. There is always work to do. Such is democracy. It’s messy. It’s ongoing. It’s never complete. “A more perfect union” and whatnot.
Elsewhere:
Florida (via Florida Phoenix): “DeSantis administration moving to regulate AI from pre-K to Ph.D.”
Philadelphia (from Main Line Times and Suburban): “Parents file suit against Lower Merion School District over new tech policy”
Sydney, Australia (ia The Guardian): “‘We have had enough’: thousands of University of Sydney staff walk off the job over AI and job security”
South Africa: “I refused to train the AI that could replace me” writes sociologist James Maisiri
An office near you (from Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine newsletter: “Why office workers are turning against AI”
Related in Some Way Maybe:
“The Return of the Teen Crime Panic” by Dana Liebelson in the New York Review of Books
Via The Hechinger Report: “English-only proposal for Head Start would set kids back, say parents and program leaders”
Also via The Hechinger Report: “How Florida quietly removed climate change content from textbooks”
“Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why” in MIT Technology Review
Via Strange Matters: “Chomsky After Epstein”
“AI Tutors Not Yet a Replacement for Humans, Research Says” via The 74. Not sure why one needs to put “yet” in there. Why hand storytelling about the future over to a product this way? (Particularly when chatbots remain so utterly dangerous.)
“Virtual school enrollment has doubled in recent years, following pandemic-era surge,” Matt Barnum reports
Yikes, I’m sorry to link to The Atlantic, but here you go: “A Society of Cheats”
Spinning up the PR/Plagiarism Machine:
From the Pew Reseach Center: “How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?”
Pangram seemed to have a big PR push lately with the company’s CEO talking with Derek Thompson (“We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internet”) and with Techcrunch, and with a story in Wired (“Pangram Has Emerged as the Gold Standard of AI Detection. Should You Trust It?”), among other places.
I’m working on a talk I plan to give in a few weeks about the history of TurnItIn, which certainly predates the whole LLM debacle but is a story that contains some of the cough generative elements of today’s fixations about cheating and automated essay production.
Today’s bird is the bowerbird, known for its complex courtship rituals that involve "tinkering" of sorts: the male bird builds elaborate structures out of sticks and brightly colored objects in order to attract a mate. I'll skip over all the verbiage in the Wikipedia entry on the species, full of speculation about how and why this practice evolved (including some wild theories that the bowers can involve optical illusions tricking the females into paying attention for longer). Good grief. I mean, maybe the female bowerbirds are just relieved the males stay busy with a hobby.
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