On technological millenarianism in the education system: prompted by AI

Film still from Bienvenido, Mister Marshall (1953). / Source: Font: muvim.es

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Alfonso A. Gracia Gómez

It never fails. The moment a new digital gadget appears, an entire cast of experts emerges from the shadows to announce the end of the world, while simultaneously hymning the advent of a brave new, transformed society. We have seen it countless times: the personal computer and Encarta; Moodle and Canva; Wikipedia and Kahoot; personal devices; the interactive whiteboard. Each of these successive innovations has had its brief hour of glory in the kind of apocalypse that education has lately become. Now it is the turn of so-called “artificial intelligence”, and the outlook appears more catastrophic than ever.

The preachers of this new deity are convinced that this time it is final: we shall never again teach content. The prophecy has at last been fulfilled. No mortal knowledge can even begin to rival the infinite wisdom hidden within the arcane algorithms of the latest toy. These have revealed to us the evidence of our original sin, and so the vain habit of thinking for oneself must be eradicated. Artificial Intelligence has come to save us from ourselves. Mea culpa. Yet absolution requires a firm purpose of amendment: let us abandon the path of knowledge and devote ourselves, body and soul, to the only activity that can still redeem us. In place of teachers, the new religion demands priests. All is not lost—but the world must urgently learn to place itself in the service of Artificial Intelligence.

At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, this fatalism strikes me as more than a little overdone—if not an outright exercise in manipulation. It presents itself as a sober diagnosis grounded in the current state of technology, but it bears a closer resemblance to what Marx described as the “opium of the people”: it anaesthetises criticism of the present in exchange for the promise of a better world that never quite materialises. The real problem lies in the ferocious success these narratives have enjoyed among the public. The evangelising fever has spread like wildfire and, to my mind, reveals itself as little more than the urge to sell whatever happens to be in vogue. In the end, the quasi-religious fervour of these “prophets” differs little from a marketing campaign—one that proves highly profitable for a select few (the owners and traders of the new fetish), who reap the rewards of the consumerist zeal they themselves have whipped up.

Official pedagogical discourse has been no exception, despite its champions’ claims to be the standard-bearers of critical thinking. The contagion has spread so far that it is now difficult to distinguish many of its proselytes from mere snake-oil salesmen—a metaphor that, worn though it may be, remains painfully apt when diagnosing the culture of grand promises that characterises the hordes of scrap-merchants currently crowding faculties of education. The result is a growing number of “experts” only too ready to dispense with educational institutions altogether, barely concealing their eagerness to see them reduced to obsolete junk.

It increasingly seems as though old-fashioned consumerism has installed itself at the very heart of public administration, masquerading as progress. Instead of addressing real problems, we squander scarce resources feeding a fountain of youth that merely “renews” the very difficulties we face in the classroom. Contemporary education thus languishes, victim of a kind of bovarism: like Flaubert’s heroine, we find ourselves locked into an accelerated race towards self-destruction. And those affected will only recognise the scale of the deception—if we ever do so as a society—once the bubble has swollen to the point of bursting in our faces.

This is the dogmatic dream of the twenty-first century: the belief that a tool can transcend the material realities of the classroom—class sizes, teacher exhaustion, social inequality. Reality, however, has a habit of asserting itself. The first reality to confront us is the economic one, which quickly reveals that the current rush towards AI is being driven neither by pedagogues nor by public administrations, but by venture capital, operating through investment funds and technology giants in search of the next market niche. As a business model, the aim is not gradual, sustainable improvement, but rapid scaling, user capture and data monetisation.

Yet eye-watering turnover does not necessarily mean profitability, and a private company that fails to turn a profit is unlikely to endure. A perfectly plausible outcome, therefore, is the formation of a financial bubble, not unlike that of the early 2000s during the “dot-com boom”. This is why the present pedagogical obsession with what is labelled “innovation” cannot help but call to mind the celebrated—if now rather dated—film Bienvenido, Mister Marshall, directed by Luis García Berlanga: not so much for its social satire, much of which remains relevant, as for the desperate rush of the fictional villagers of Villar del Río towards a promise of improvements that are ultimately destined to amount to nothing.

There is, indeed, something almost comical in the devout surrender with which pedagogism greets each new technology, and Artificial Intelligence is no exception. Pedagogical innovationism oscillates between uncritical consumerist anxiety, fuelled by an addiction to novelty, and the anguish induced by the spectre of an imminent end of days. If nothing is “as it used to be”—not the world, not children, not even ourselves—why should knowledge or its transmission remain unchanged? Hence the call to abandon what is already known and make room for “novel” learning, where the supposedly “revolutionary” gesture consists in discarding books and teachers’ expertise, replacing them with “products” made “with” Encarta, Wikipedia or Artificial Intelligence. The tool, elevated to an end in itself.

The result is a state of technological dependence that nevertheless lacks even the outline of a roadmap. The obsession with reshaping the education system to suit each alleged innovation has already produced a perverse effect in our schools: permanent obsolescence. One platform replaces another before there has been time to assess the effects of its predecessor. New licences become new obligations, while our “old” devices are swiftly rendered unusable. Innovations are imposed by decree and rarely command the consensus needed to confer even minimal credibility among the professionals expected to implement them.

No scientific—or pseudo-scientific—argument can justify such haste in education. What we are witnessing is the instrumentalisation of the education system itself, reduced to a means for the benefit of third parties. We are not even fully aware of the pedagogical consequences of these tools, and there is no shortage of warnings about their harmful effects on pupils: addictive behaviours, loss of attention, difficulties in the development of literacy. If every new drug in medicine must undergo years of clinical trials before being released, why do we so readily turn schools into laboratories?

I find it hard to believe that any genuine educational innovation will arrive neatly packaged in a fashionable, venture-capital-funded app. What is urgently required, therefore, is a moratorium on enthusiasm. Before any innovation is introduced, it must be rigorously evaluated—and that means waiting until we know what works, what does not, for whom, and under what conditions. Until such decisions can be grounded in solid evidence rather than advertising slogans, the obsession with technology is doomed to remain just another of the many noises that daily drown out the atmosphere of a good lesson: that of a teacher who knows what they are doing and what they are saying, in a dignified space, with the necessary resources and the time required to use them properly.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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