Top 5 Reflections on AI in Education
As the 2025 school year comes to an end, what's the verdict on AI in education?
After the first full year of student and teacher experimentation with generative AI, what’s the verdict?
Here’s five of the most insightful pieces of media grappling with this inflection point in education.
5. “Teachers Are Not Okay”
Teachers have a nearly impossible job… is AI really making it easier?
OpenAI claims that ChatGPT is being used to “help teachers create personalized lesson plans and spend more time with students”.
But it’s heartbreaking to hear from teachers about the impact AI has actually had, especially among English teachers.
The more we think that we are unable to actually teach students, the less meaningful our jobs are.
I've been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student.
That sure feels like bullshit. I'm going through the motions of teaching. I'm putting a lot of time and emotional effort into it, as well as the intellectual effort, and it's getting flushed into the void.
LLMs have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching.
I adopted an absolute zero tolerance policy on any use of ChatGPT or any similar tool in my course, working my way down the funnel of progressive acceptance to outright conservative, Luddite rejection.
Honestly, if we ejected all the gen AI tools into the sun, I would be quite pleased.
4. “AI is a Religious Cult”
Claims that AI will ascend to divine levels of intelligence in a few short years isn’t something we should take on faith.
There’s some core tenants in the AGI mythology. AI is going to:
cure cancer
bring super affordable, amazing healthcare to everyone
solve climate change
wave the wand and wipe away poverty
[…] this is a quasi-religious movement that has gripped the minds of people working within Silicon Valley.
People think they’re creating god or the devil.
Empire of AI author Karen Hao infers that “all the features of empire building” are present in AI companies.
Their wealth is based on the exploitation of Africans that work as data labelers and content moderators. They’re the real intelligence behind AI, but get paid pennies for it.
The workers allege that the practices of companies like Meta, OpenAI, and data provider Scale AI “amount to modern day slavery.”
US Big Tech companies are systemically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards.
These empires also extract minerals for data center computer hardware in places like the Atacama desert, displacing indigenous populations.
Additionally, OpenAI is building data centers that will require 5 Gigawatts to operate. That’s a massive amount of power, equivalent to the output of several nuclear power plants. Even if generated by renewable energy sources, it’s power that could’ve been used to reduce people’s utility bills.
3. “The AI Rapture Ain’t Nigh”
This belief, this hope, this yearning, for a rapture. For this instantaneous moment where a high power, be it a deity or a new technology, whisks us away from all the problems we find so intractable and challenging.
Dan Meyer refers to polls from 2023 and 2024, that show just 2% of teachers “use AI a lot”. So much for the AI revolution?
But can’t AI build entire apps and websites already? No need to learn coding anymore? Don’t believe the hype.
Notable AI startup, Builder.ai declared bankruptcy last month, since it was revealed that their “AI” was Actual Indians!
At its peak, Builder.ai raised over $450 million and achieved a valuation of $1.5 billion. But the company’s glittering image masked a starkly different reality.
Contrary to its claims, Builder.ai’s development process relied on around 700 human engineers in India. These engineers manually wrote code for client projects while the company portrayed the work as AI-generated.
“Fake it ‘till you make it” seems to be the plan of many AI companies that promise the moon.
Speaking of snake oil…
2. “Educating Kids in the Age of AI”
Rebecca Winthrop is a director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.
It’s a fancy title that makes her sound credible and trustworthy. But what kind of policy does Brookings promote?
In the 1920s, half of US wealth was owned by 1% of Americans. Brookings correctly identified this as the cause of the Great Depression, but opposed the New Deal’s redistributive policies.
Brookings President Harold G. Moulton, who had been supportive of the Roosevelt administration’s initial efforts to respond to the depression through austerity measures, became opposed to the deficit spending on public works and employment programs that became the hallmarks of the New Deal.
Over a hundred years have passed. Wealth inequality in the US nearing all time highs yet again. Economic elites are still paying Brookings to craft intellectual justifications for policies that benefit the few, the ultra rich, over policies which would benefit most.
With this context in mind, you won’t be shocked, as many commentators were, that the concept of paying teachers more is absent from this discussion on how to improve K-12 education in the US.
NYT journalist Ezra Klein prompts:
I think one reason you see a lot of anger among young people today is that the deal often doesn't come through. You do all the extracurriculars, you get your good grades, you show up on time, and then you graduate college and the good jobs and the interesting life you were promised just aren't there. And so there's something there that feels like it is getting thrown into question if we don't know what the future's going to ask of us.
How can we be instrumental in the way we train people for it?
People have never been able to predict the future, but the rate at which the world is changing does seem to be ramping up due to advancements in AI.
So what’s a solution that Brookings endorses?
[There are] schools that [use] AI [to] do sort of tech-based uh education on core subjects for a couple hours a day: math, science, reading, social studies. Then for the rest of the day they’re doing projects together on whatever it may be that they so decide. And there's a curriculum, there's things you know the teachers want them to learn. It's not a every kid do whatever you want. Um, but that's super motivating. There's no reason that we couldn't do that with the existing staff and people and school buildings and infrastructure. We just have to have the willpower to decide to do things differently.
That’s right… Brookings vision of the future of public education is turning every school into an Alpha School. Winthrop even mentions it by name later in the interview.
Why is this a big deal? See my previous article “AI Schools, the Future of Education?”.
1. “The Educational Crisis”
None of the mainstream corporate media reporting on Alpha School mentions its connection to multi-billionaire, Joe Liemandt.
Try searching “Joe Liemandt” on YouTube, you won’t find much.
He might not want average Joes to know that he's the man behind the curtain, and the principal of Alpha School, just his fellow billionaire buddies at World Governments Summit in Dubai.
This was Liemandt’s first public interview in decades.
Currently this video has a mere 563 views. It hasn’t been shared on the social media accounts of any of Liemandt’s businesses, some of which have millions of subscribers. Is Liemandt only taking credit for his AI school initiative among those eager to embrace it?
Teachers at our school, how they act, it’s not I’m going to teach seventh grade math or sixth grade science, their primary role is motivational and emotional support for the kids. Because they’re not grading tests and writing lesson plans, they spend their time getting to know the kids’ aspirations, figuring out how to associate… you know the biggest thing in education is the motivated student and what these teachers, coaches, and guides are able to do is spend their time making students have a why behind their studying. And because of that they get dramatically different uh… uh… Teachers didn’t come into the profession to grade tests, they did it to transform kids lives.
Yeah, he’s got a habitual inability to finish sentences. Or was that awkward mid-sentence u-turn on the subject of test scores a Freudian slip?
Read between the lines though, Liemandt is painting an even rosier picture for the attendees. If AI teaches all subjects, then the amount of qualified teachers on payroll can be significantly reduced. If applied to public (government funded) schools, the cost cutting could be massive and would give politicians a justification to further reduce taxes on the ultra rich.
Big publishers also stand to gain a lot from their resources becoming the default curriculum nation-wide, eliminating the ability for teachers to choose competing products from small businesses and independent creators.
From “Do Kids Want a Personalized Netflix for Education” by Dan Meyer:
I can more easily imagine that AI will make education unnecessary (by automating every kind of work, let’s say, or enslaving all of us in data centers) than I can imagine AI transforming education.
Am I crying wolf here? I certainly hope that in a few years we can look back at this and laugh.
The online curriculum based, AI assisted, self-study school model of Alpha School, seems to work for certain types of students, but claims that it’d benefit the masses ought to be criticized.
Nevertheless, AI could transform education in way that makes corporations and the ultra rich even wealthier. So given the current political climate in the US, I’ll continue to monitor Liemandt’s foray into education closely because I unequivocally support human teachers.
For my next article I’m taking a look at how educators are combatting AI overuse with plans on how to motivate students to learn, express themselves creatively, and think critically. Stay tuned! ☺️