technology in schools is good. it’s a great aid for teachers. but wait, asks the greatest minds of silicon valley, why have teachers at all? let’s disrupt education with technology. it sounds great. it sounds cool as shit. but:

digitizing education would be one thing if we hadn’t learned by now how dangerous the idea of technology and its application as apolitical and ideologically neutral is. everything is political, including knowledge. what we learn, what we don’t learn, and how we learn it shapes everything we know, everything we think we know, and everything about how we see the world.

digitization opens the educational system up to coming under dictatorial or corporate control. like media monopolies right now, or even ideology based school franchises, or countries with full propaganda education systems). there is very little in existence that’s more attractive for unaccountable self-interested power seekers to co-opt than technology which will have mass usage, especially when education is one of the subtlest possible ways of control. an asshole principal is one thing, one unaccountable official or billionaire controlling everything millions of kids learn is another. school boards and education departments are dysfunctional but are at least partly accountable to parents and voters.

removing teacher labor while increasing tech isn’t an original concept, but something that’s been tried dozens of times to detriment of students (and is just an extension of replacing human workers with automation, like many other industries). and there’s no real control group for “no teachers, all tech”, which means there’s almost no evidence for a huge restructuring of society.

removing the human element ignores all the literature and research on how kids learn. there’s plenty of that research out there, but education policy is too often dictated by outsiders who believe that anyone could do it. there’s a reason why an entire field of academia devoted to education exists, and that’s because it’s not that easy. you need to at least be familiar with the research on pedagogy and child development. on which note, removing the human element also ignores a lot of neuroscience, especially about early childhood development, particularly about the necessity of human contact and interaction to avoid severe developmental issues into adulthood. and that’s without considering that most students aren’t going to get the same attention and time from their families to supplement their education that, say, even home-schooled students get, so they’re just going to have a complete dearth of human interaction altogether.

there’s also the practical issues. most education isn’t as easy for a computer to teach and correct as a student learns as, say, coding is. most subjects from humanities to arts to prose/poetry to sport to philosophy, require human coaching and feedback to complex ideas that not even the most powerful AI today can handle.

all in all, most arguments against teachers work better as ones for higher standards for teachers. the problems with education that are most discussed as needing improvement are problems that could be solved where teachers are to have rigorous training, regular professional development, and are compensated accordingly as professionals. places without these often don’t value teachers and make it a low-value job, which is self fulfilling.