Artificial Intelligence.  It’s the wave of the future.  It has invaded our homes in the form of Alexa, Dot and Siri.  I even find myself thanking Siri after she does something for me.  Not it, she.  I sit at my computer and if I have a question about how to spell something or I need to look something up, I just ask Siri and she tells me.  I too have fallen under the spell of A.I.

I’ve always been a bit of a SciFi buff, with movies and TV shows like Star Trek, Lost in Space, Star Wars and others being my favorite, and all of them featuring robots. How wonderful if the Jetsons could be the real deal and I had a robot maid.  But I can, can’t I,  by just purchasing a Roomba to vacuum my carpets.  Now if I just had a robot to fold my fitted sheets.

School is another place where we are being invaded by artificial intelligence, but it’s not necessarily in the form of technology or curriculum.  No, it is in the form of a human, a teacher.  A person who is trained in various content to teach children to love learning and our system is turning them into robots.  Teachers are wonderful human beings, all different with varied amounts of experience both in and out of the classroom.  They have different personalities, different temperaments, different levels of tolerance.  They have passions for certain areas of learning and different levels of training.  They come from different backgrounds and cultures. Yes, each classroom teacher is a unique human being and yet – schools are trying to turn them into robots so that each child receives the same thing in the name of “equity”.

So how does this work?  Well, it starts with using consistent language.  This is so every child has the benefit of hearing the same message from all adults.  All very innocent and seemingly logical.  After all, if a child hears the same message from multiple adults, that child isn’t as confused as to what expectations are.  Never mind that when that child leaves school that they will never encounter that same environment ever again where they don’t receive mixed messages.  It’s better that we make school life easy on them, not necessarily preparation for adulthood.

Then teachers are asked to keep track of their praise to reprimand ratio in the classroom.  After all, some research says that students learn better when teachers are aware of how often they give specific praise.  So, in their spare time, teachers are asked to keep track of this.  Again, this will really come in handy when they get that first job with the boss who has never heard of that research and whose personality is such that they only praise you when it’s really meaningful.  Again, making life more artificial for the student, more work for the teacher in preparation for becoming the robot.

Of course now there is the script.  Lessons are not necessarily created with the trained teacher who knows her students in mind.  They are created for the A.I. Teacher, the robot who can spout the exact same lesson as every other teacher at that grade level within the district.  The reasons again seem logical.  If a child should happen to transfer within the district, they can be guaranteed the same teaching wherever he or she goes.  It guarantees equity in that every child is taught everything the same way at the same time.  Doesn’t leave much room for real differentiation does it?  Never mind that children don’t learn the same things in the same ways.  As long as the delivery was equal, we’ve done our robot duty.

My older colleagues, the ones who have not had a drink from the A.I. Kool-aid water, have lived through a time when teachers decided the pacing based on what the specific students in his/her class needed, and what kind of discipline or consequences were needed for each individual child.  Even with my own children, I was never able to give the same consequences for their actions because their personalities were so different.  Why would it work in a classroom?  Anytime I see something that screams “formula” and it deals with human beings, I am very wary and yet, formulas are all I see today in education, wrapped up in the guise of research.

So seriously, why not just put a robot or a computer screen up in front of the class?  If all we’re going to do is deliver content in a script form, deal with behavior in the same way as every other child and never differentiate how we speak to them, we might as well.  I’m sure it’s easier on administrators who have to evaluate teachers, some of whom are also drinking the Kool-aid, having been out of the classroom long enough that they don’t remember what it was like to actually “teach”.

I for one am grateful for the subject I teach and that it hasn’t (to this point, at least) been scripted.  Sure I have goals and essential outcomes, curriculum and behavioral expectations, but these at tweaked, class by class, student by student.  It’s difficult to develop A.I. in the arts because it’s all about self expression, the opposite of what is being asked of both students and teachers in many classrooms today.  But maybe that’s what the public wants – to get away from the “institution of school”, the learning factory and became an A.I. manufacturer instead.  Then for sure we won’t need certified teachers in the classrooms – only artificial intelligence.