Submission by Patti Johnson
Parents are frustrated with public education, and justifiably so. Most of the school day is spent on nonacademic activities that are mainly DEI-related. This has been going on for a long time. Now, a private school in Oklahoma is selling what looks like an escape: classrooms with no human teachers. AI software will deliver the entire academic curriculum. Students will spend two hours a day in front of screens while algorithms teach them. The school claims these children learn twice as fast and post sky-high SAT scores. Do not fall for it.
The model started at Alpha School in Austin, Texas, and is spreading fast. Campuses are opening in Edmond and Tulsa, Oklahoma. A related Arizona charter school, Unbound Academy, uses the same AI system.
Homeschool parents already teach more real academics in half the time of public schools because they skip the DEI filler. Most of them will reject this AI scheme. Working parents who hear “twice the learning” and “higher SAT scores” may not.
The same push is coming from Florida. Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds’ wife, Erika Donalds, has said she wants 12 AI assistants in every Florida classroom. She is the founder and CEO of OptimaEd, an online education technology company that bills itself as the world’s first virtual reality school and curriculum. She stands to make millions by placing AI teaching tools in classrooms and routing funds from the nonprofit side to her for-profit companies, a practice she has used before with taxpayer dollars from charter schools. OptimaEd already promotes virtual field trips through VR headsets so students never have to leave the classroom. Who wouldn’t want to reduce our children’s ability even further to interact with other human beings? And won’t every child just love never leaving the building for real experiences?
This is not better education. It is the deliberate removal of human contact. Children already spend too much time on screens. Now, the plan is to erase the one adult relationship that used to define school. No real teacher to notice struggle or confusion. No human voice teaching how to think and argue using facts and common sense. Just software and “guides” who are barred from teaching content. The same people pushing AI classrooms often push more AI data centers. The pattern is clear.
The waste of academic instructional time is nothing new. Back in the 1990s, when I served on the Colorado State Board of Education, parents complained that their high school pulled students out of class for a full hour to watch a troupe of all-female Chinese dancers. The leader of the troupe told the students that males are useless and that all the dancers were lesbians. That is just one example of many nonacademic DEI activities that I witnessed back then. It has only gotten worse.
The health risks are serious. Electromagnetic radiofrequency emissions from constant wireless devices and VR headsets hit developing brains harder than adult brains. Children’s thinner skulls and developing neural networks absorb more energy. The brain actually heats up. Studies have linked this exposure to memory problems, behavioral changes, oxidative stress, reduced neuron growth and possible connections to childhood brain tumors and leukemia. The Environmental Health Trust has also compiled research on children’s vulnerability to radiofrequency radiation.
Decades ago, Dustin Heuston of Utah’s World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching stated the real goal:
“We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act as if it were 10 of the top psychologists working with one student. … Won’t it be wonderful when no one can get between that child and that curriculum?”
That is the plan. Remove every human barrier between the child and the machine. This is not a new idea. It fulfills the long-standing goal of the technocrats. Going back to Technocracy Inc. in the 1930s, the movement under Howard Scott sought a society run by technical experts and machines rather than parents, teachers or elected officials. Their vision was total scientific management of human life, including the education of children, with computers and data systems replacing what they considered “messy” human judgment. AI teachers are simply the modern delivery system for that same project. Don’t fall for it!
Feature photo: Maximalfocus on Unsplash
