This Grade School Offers AI-Only Classes, No Teachers Involved

A charter school in Arizona recently received approval from the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools to offer a fully online school experience for grades four through eight that gives students just two hours of academic instruction per day — taught entirely by artificial intelligence. If ever there was an idea that sounds doomed to fail.

Unbound Academy will offer students personalized learning software provided by IXL and Khan Academy, both online educational resource companies. The AI will use each child’s emotional cues, responses to questions and tasks, and the time it takes them to complete assigned tasks to create tailor-made lessons. Unbound says they already have a similar educational model up and running in Texas.

How useful any of these lessons will be to students who don’t have a flesh and blood human providing it for them, establishing a tangible connection to reality, remains to be seen. For instance, what happens if the student has a question? Can the AI think in the abstract to get the point of a lesson across to a student on the fly the way a good, creative teacher can?

The actual “schooling” the students receive may only last for two hours, but the rest of their school day will be dedicated to life skill workshops in financial literacy, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and public speaking. These workshops will not be led by teachers but rather by “guides.”

Given there’s often a profit motive behind charter schools and very little altruistic desire to pass knowledge down to the next generation, a school without teachers sounds like the ultimate capitalist educational experience. A school without any pesky teachers to pay who will then form a union to demand fair pay like greedy cretins who have to cough up their own money for basic classroom supplies even though many of them can barely afford rent.

Do you ever get the sense that the entire tech industry took a weird turn in the past 5 to 10 years toward actively attempting to replace some of the most important pillars of our society with a bunch of lines of code that can’t think creatively, or even on its own? They want to replace all of us with technology that fundamentally would not exist without being fed our work, and often without our permission. The tech industry has done a great job of making us feel like they despise us.