I can’t be the only one who reads both this blog and some of the deeply-in-the-heart-of-AI ones like Astral Codex Ten.
What many of the true AI believers in SF/Silicon Valley think about education is actually scarier even than “screens help kids learn” or “jobs are all screen based anyway”. For many of them, they think that AI is a superhuman form of life that will soon (like, before 2030) take over most thinking and once AI itself designs better robots, most real world jobs too.
Half of them then think that humanity is cooked and the robots will kill us, and half think we’ll be kept as kind of like primates in a zoo. No need to learn to think or write or anything because what’ll be the point? The artificial superintelligence will do all of it better and faster anyway.
Even the tech-industry folks who don’t go this far still believe that little armies of AI agents will do all our thinking for us and take all actions, write your emails, etc. Also common is a belief that the thing to do is to become part of the capital-owning class as soon as possible since AI will supercharge wealth polarization even more than it already is.
All of which is to say — these people do not have our children’s best interests at heart. It all needs to be out of schools as soon as possible. More broadly: Our thinking is what makes us human. If we outsource that, what’s the point? (No wonder they don’t care about schools. They’ve given up on the future of the species, many of them.)
In developing knowledge of and experience with the use of AI, such as for research purposes, of how much of a machine it is, and a thinker it is not. In the end, a human should have to sign off on anything to propose it to be true.
I have surely seen the AI support a position, and then support the exact opposite position, and this can branch in multiple directions. I am reminded of what is needed to write a good research paper in 1950, or whenever, of that which has not changed. The best question I've ever asked an AI is, "What does the opposition say?" That is also the best question I have asked prior to the use of any AI. Tackling the topic from as many different angles as possible, and hunting down greater numbers of scenarios for context, with or without the machine, contributes the same quality to the result. Yes, the machine can wade through mountains of material in seconds, but only I can truly perform the high-level function, which will be to say that whatever is being said is ultimately true or false.
When you pull back the curtain of the screen, you are still left with a learning culture that has learned how not to learn. The learning culture is, and has always been, play deprived. That's why the temperament of young people is conditioned to gravitate towards the shiny things, the low-hanging fruit in the lives of everyone these days. The learning culture is a vacuum, a terrain of depleted soil where conversation could thrive if play propelled the classroom ecosystem the way it propels human intelligence. Play as a force of nature needs to be fully present in the hands and hearts of all the participants. An infrastructure composed of play -based communication is called for to make play central to the learning culture.
Hi Sophie. I worked in educational publishing for several decades. I came to it from the world of journalism. It was an absolutely wonderful experience that met a tragic ending: our company, an old and venerated one, was slowly destroyed by private equity. But that's another story. What surprised me was how fad-prone the field of education is. In the beginning, I would go to teachers conventions every year and every year the leaders in the field would be pushing another yet another new approach to teaching, often something involving the latest technologies. I grew very cynical pretty quickly and stopped going to the conventions.
Corporations have influenced schools for a very long time. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, wealthy industrialists began investing heavily in education.
Not because they funded everyday public schools directly through taxes—that remained primarily the responsibility of local and state governments—but because they shaped what schools taught and how they were organized. Major philanthropists included: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Their foundations financed:
Teacher training
Universities
School libraries
Vocational education
Educational research
Curriculum development
The Factory Model of Schooling
If we're still pretending that these philanthropists were simply trying to give back, we're being incredibly naive. Each of these men built their fortunes in industry, grooming immigrant adults and their entire families, how to behave in factory environment. This is when schools became organized around:
Bells
Fixed schedules
Grade levels
Standardized curriculum
Age grouping
Efficiency
Standardized testing
Large classrooms
The industrial model of education was never designed to cultivate independent, critical thinkers. It emerged during a period of rapid industrialization, when the economy demanded large numbers of workers who could reliably follow procedures, arrive on time, respect hierarchy, and perform standardized tasks. Schools increasingly mirrored factories: bells signaled transitions, students were grouped by age, learning was standardized, and success was measured by compliance and the ability to produce the "right" answers.
Critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging accepted ideas were not the primary objectives of this system. In many ways, they were inconvenient. Imagine a factory floor filled with workers who constantly questioned every instruction from an authoritarian supervisor. Efficiency—the defining goal of industrial production—would grind to a halt. The educational system evolved to support the needs of that economy, rewarding obedience, conformity, and consistency far more often than curiosity, creativity, or independent thought.
That doesn't mean every educator wanted to suppress independent thinking. Many exceptional teachers have always encouraged students to ask questions, explore ideas, and think for themselves. But the structure of the system itself was built around standardization rather than intellectual exploration and capacity. The result is a legacy that still influences education today, even as the skills most needed in the modern world—critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, and innovation—are the very qualities that standardized systems have often struggled to develop.
Many historians describe this as the "factory model." It mirrored industrial workplaces because that was considered the most efficient organizational system available. One well-known example was the Gary Plan, developed by William Wirt in the early 1900s.
Students rotated through:
Academic classrooms
Workshops
Gymnasiums
Auditoriums
This allowed schools to educate more students using the same buildings and reflected efficiency principles popular in industry.
Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. The work of Frederick Winslow Taylor greatly influenced schools. Taylor developed "scientific management," which emphasized:
Standardization
Measurement
Efficiency
Specialized roles
Productivity
School administrators adopted many of these management practices, although classroom teachers often adapted or resisted them.
Were Schools Designed to Create Factory Workers? This is one of the most debated claims and as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in schools, I struggle with the idea that this ideas is even debatable at this point.
Schools were not created solely as factories for producing obedient workers. Industrial efficiency was one influence among several.
Who Actually Paid for Public Schools? The vast majority of funding has historically come from:
Local property taxes
State governments
Federal government (a much larger role after the mid-20th century)--also heavily influenced by corporations and their lobbyists.
Corporate "philanthropy" influenced educational policy and innovation and it's doing this today, pervasively.
Many features of today's schools reflect their 19th- and early 20th-century origins:
Age-based grades
School bells
Standardized testing
Fixed schedules
Uniform curricula
Seat-time requirements
If we hope to transform public education, we'll need to persuade the organizations with the greatest influence and resources—including major corporations—that investing in schools designed to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and human potential is also an investment in their own future.
Tomorrow's workforce will not be defined by how well people follow instructions. Increasingly, success will depend on the ability to think critically, solve novel problems, collaborate across disciplines, and innovate in ways machines cannot. These are the very capacities that flourish through the arts, music, design, theater, and other creative pursuits that have too often been treated as expendable rather than essential.
The same is true for physical well-being. An active body supports an active mind. Research continues to demonstrate the connection between movement, exercise, attention, emotional regulation, learning, and mental health. Recess should not be viewed as wasted instructional time, and physical education should no longer be treated as an afterthought. They are foundational to helping children develop into healthy, engaged, resilient learners.
The irony is that the very skills and capacities many employers now say they desperately need—creativity, adaptability, emotional intelligence, collaboration, resilience, and sound judgment—are often the first casualties when schools become narrowly focused on standardized testing and measurable outputs. If corporations truly want a future workforce capable of navigating complexity and driving innovation, they have a vested interest in supporting an educational system that develops whole human beings, not simply efficient workers.
I appreciate what you're saying. From the top of a big hierarchy, uniformity serves.
In an example from the article (LA), it took a citizen group to influence the school board in the right direction. More primary schools can be influenced more locally by parents/citizens. This is doable in an age where the general population appears to have no effect at a federal level. That would take national citizen organization - I think more likely, state-wide organization is doable.
Yes, I agree. Only, most parents these days, with both working, at least one job, maybe more, don’t have the space to dive into the PTA, or whatever it’s called these days, to advocate for these sense making changes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working in environments with undeserved children and heard the comment that “these parents just don’t care” far too many times to stomach.
In a quick search, I did find this and will share that I agree with this 100%—When I bought my first laptop (early adopter over 30 years ago), I envisioned a time when more people would be working from home than going to the office. Who knew Covid was coming and the surge of remote workers. As someone who came out of the womb organizing social communities, I pondered that this would then require a heightened sense of community because human beings need socialization and if people were not engaged at work, they would need to create other spaces. Then came co-working spaces and an abundance of coffee shops that somewhat fills this need, but I haven’t seen either, and I’ve belonged to two co-working spaces that I enjoyed, but they’re really missing the mark on intentional community as they center only on workspace and ways to grow a business…. and coffee shops, at least where I live, miss the mark altogether and as a business consultant, that’s a strange dynamic to witness. Every shop and co-working space would profit more by taking this on…. “Robert Putnam's theory centers on social capital—the idea that social networks, norms of reciprocity, and trust hold communities together and make democratic societies function. He famously argued that a decline in civic engagement and community involvement leads to poorer governance, increased polarization, and widespread social isolation.”
Thanks for your note. I’m not familiar with Putnam’s work, but I do know that a lot of scholars and others have written about the loss of community and I have tons of my own theories as well. I like the thought of there being local groups that are helpful. Say more.
And why did big tech participate in undermining the education system to abandon the common sense that children cannot change their sex? Might attempts to change kids' exterior appearance with drugs and surgeries be a really bad idea that spreads like a contagion harming families and society on a mass scale?
Sophie, this is exactly right, and there's a mechanism underneath it worth naming. Learning isn't information transfer, it's the slow cultivation of a rich, personally-threaded memory substrate: the "fibrous journey" you describe. Handwriting, paper, boredom, a teacher's eyes on you: these all force the child to do the threading themselves, latent to active, effortfully.
Unfortunately, I currently teach math online mostly for the past 6 years since covid. Autocomplete or a chatbot tutor doesn't help the child weave their own mind together, it substitutes an external one. The engagement mechanics you name (streaks, rewards) aren't a design flaw bolted onto good pedagogy, they're what happens when a system optimizes for attention capture instead of memory formation. Because I teach online, I rely mostly on grading notebooks, with lots of practice with pencil and paper. This is my workaround. And project-based learning.
What a smart woman! She also happens to be a prominent member of the British Royal Family, yet unlike another actress member of that family who sells jam with her title, she never mentions it. That's because she is not an insecure arrivist.
Sophie — thank you for this essay. The engagement-metric slot-machine critique and the "personalized learning as depersonalized learning" quote from John Warner are two of the sharpest lines in the field this year, and I'll be citing both of you repeatedly.
For readers who stayed with the piece to the end: the products Sophie is describing — Chromebook autocomplete assistants, chatbot tutors on canonical content, engagement dashboards — are what I'd call controller architectures. AI deployed above the student, prescribing from outside. Complex Adaptive Systems theory of AI tutoring predicts they will fail exactly the way Sophie describes them failing: they fall into what my paper under review at BJET calls surface-compliance and mutual-capitulation attractors. Sophie's diagnosis is right; CAS names the mechanism.
There is a different architectural category — AI as constituent agent participating in a course's local rules, on a high-friction doer-effect substrate. My FIN 345 finance students at Ensign College compute CAMEL ratios by hand from raw 10-K filings; the AI persona works alongside them, not above them. It sustains the crawling phase Sophie rightly wants to protect.
Sophie's critique is required reading. The architectural alternative she may not have encountered is real, and it works.
It's not only the low-level dopaminergic stimulation from the blue light that zaps and dazes us, it's also the transcranial magnetic stimulation from the "low-level" radiofrequency that many parents want to pretend does not exist.
Jonathan Haidt made an important contribution to the debate about childhood and social media. He recovered a genuine signal that had been obscured when researchers grouped together different technologies, different activities and different populations.
But I think he then made a more fundamental mistake.
He recovered the signal, but prematurely promoted it to the status of cause.
A stronger association between social media use and poorer mental health—particularly among adolescent girls—does not, by itself, identify the underlying mechanism. My reading of the evidence is that the more plausible biological pathway is sleep.
Social media is not a biological mechanism. Sleep disruption is.
Social media may delay bedtime, fragment sleep, increase emotional arousal and keep adolescents engaged at precisely the time the brain should be down-regulating. Poor sleep then affects attention, emotional regulation, reward processing, stress physiology and resilience. Social media may therefore be an amplifier acting on an already vulnerable developmental system rather than the primary cause of that vulnerability.
That distinction matters because it changes the questions we ask.
If social media is the cause, removing social media becomes the obvious solution.
If sleep is the pathway, we ask what social media is doing to sleep.
And if childhood itself has become biologically less resilient through reduced movement, diminished free play, poorer sleep, less autonomy and fewer face-to-face relationships, then social media may simply be exploiting a vulnerability that already exists.
This brings me to Sophie Winkleman's article.
I wonder whether the same conceptual expansion is happening again.
A signal about social media has gradually become an argument about screens.
Screens become devices.
Devices become EdTech.
EdTech becomes AI.
AI becomes Big Tech.
By the end of the article we are no longer discussing one scientific hypothesis. We are discussing an entire worldview.
Yet the central concepts are never defined.
What is education?
Is it communication?
Memory?
Knowledge acquisition?
Character?
Critical thinking?
Creativity?
Examination performance?
Becoming fully human?
These are not the same thing.
Nor is technology defined.
A pencil is technology.
A book is technology.
Printing is technology.
A calculator is technology.
A laptop is technology.
AI is technology.
These are different tools serving different purposes.
The article then moves effortlessly between screens, smartphones, social media, EdTech, AI, reading apps and gamification, as though they belong to the same conceptual category. They do not.
This is precisely the kind of confusion Wittgenstein warned about. Words drift between different language games without anyone noticing that their meaning has changed.
Take handwriting.
There is good evidence that handwriting can improve learning and memory.
But handwriting is also a method of communication.
Is it better than typing for communicating ideas? Usually not.
The endpoint has changed.
The same applies to reading.
Reading is an extraordinary cultural achievement, but it is evolutionarily recent. Humans learned through listening, observation, imitation and participation for hundreds of thousands of years before widespread literacy.
Why is reading assumed to be superior to listening?
Again, the endpoint has changed.
Even gamification is treated as though it were uniquely digital.
My teachers gave me stars, certificates, house points and prizes.
These were all reinforcement schedules.
The interesting question is not whether rewards exist, but which behaviours they reinforce and to what end.
As an immunologist, I was taught that before discussing causation we define our terms carefully. We distinguish the signal from the mechanism and the mechanism from the underlying biology.
I think psychology sometimes does the opposite.
It allows familiar words—education, technology, thinking, learning, engagement—to carry several meanings simultaneously. The argument remains persuasive because the words feel familiar, even though their meanings keep changing.
Signals point.
They do not explain.
Biology explains.
Jonathan Haidt helped recover an important signal.
The next step is not to build a larger narrative around it.
It is to ask what the signal is actually signalling.
While the following issue will likely require decades of longitudinal analysis, i suspect that some factors may become highly negatively impacted through abdication of cognitive processes induced by social and productive dependence upon AI, defined as chatbots, LLMs, and instant answers.
Nonliterate human groups equipped with efficient movement tech and weaponry, became a factor in cruel invasive violent intrusions (although groups like Alexander's Macedonian Hellenes 2300 years ago).
Consider the continual increase of invasive violence due to horse tech, and the much later trading of christian conversion for firearms, to previously solely demonstrative local adjacent tribal warri g, where very low lethality and wounding had been the norm.
Do the less literate and illiterate constitute a bloc of far higher incidence of Autocratic Submissives?
As the important variable visible to anthropologists appears to be proximity to outgroups, for exploitation ( the true lifelong slaves would appear to be result of easy transport of aggressors, even when slaves were not transported so easily), the combination of illiteracy may well be the most important causal factor in acceptance of slavery AND impulse to social dominance.
I have no noticed the socially dominant to be at all the intellectually dominant, even within local and US national political parties.
Top-down causation misattribution , the dissociation involving imaginary deities unquestioned yet invented and followed for obvious outgroup exploitation, subjugation, hierarchical acceptance, persists so long as failure to critically question one's own acquired delusions, occurs.
Thank you Sophie for your powerful voice in this fight. EdTech and AI are also destroying the relationships that kids need with their teachers. “School connectedness,” which is driven by kids’ bonds with their teachers, not only promotes learning success but it also prevents kids from becoming depressed and suicidal. The last thing this increasingly depressed and suicidal generation of kids need is a screen that gets in the way of a real-world connection with a teacher. The first thing my kids talked about coming home from school was a story their teacher had told them. Such connections are what inspired them to do the hard work of learning. Every child deserves the opportunity to connect with a caring teacher, not an unfeeling laptop.
I think this is written by a knowledgeable person. I want to throw this angle in there. We have a rash of cases where there are emergency situations, and someone should dial 9/11, and people bust out there phones and film it instead. I see it looks like they view themselves as videographers, doing something useful, but also with later fallout, including either feeling shame in the following days for not actively participating, or by becoming more morally hardened.
In this sense, there is the question of what do screens do to the way we behave? We propose "cognitive offloading" in the case of information tools, which means we're not to remember anything. Plato didn't like the idea of writing for this reason, in a strongly oral time. I am also reminded of the US military's "information cockpit", which uses 7 screens that give context to the information being displayed, and increases memory retention by 55%, they say. I am reminded of reading a book, and remembering that something was halfway down the page on the left-hand side, maybe halfway through the book. That gives it a kind of context.
But screens are so much more of a way to fundamentally change our relationship with our world.
I believe, without checking that Plato merely recorded that Socrates advised against teaching writing.
He himself was literate. Socrates left no actual writings.
As i noted this way back in 9th grade i may be in error,but my memory ( moving often, i retain no Platonic materials) is that your comment concerning Plato is in error.
Just fyi, the Australian under 16 ban on social media has been a complete flop. The most recent figures show that close to 80% in that age group still manage unhindered access to these platforms one way or another. I’m afraid the genie is out of the bottle in our societies.
I can’t be the only one who reads both this blog and some of the deeply-in-the-heart-of-AI ones like Astral Codex Ten.
What many of the true AI believers in SF/Silicon Valley think about education is actually scarier even than “screens help kids learn” or “jobs are all screen based anyway”. For many of them, they think that AI is a superhuman form of life that will soon (like, before 2030) take over most thinking and once AI itself designs better robots, most real world jobs too.
Half of them then think that humanity is cooked and the robots will kill us, and half think we’ll be kept as kind of like primates in a zoo. No need to learn to think or write or anything because what’ll be the point? The artificial superintelligence will do all of it better and faster anyway.
Even the tech-industry folks who don’t go this far still believe that little armies of AI agents will do all our thinking for us and take all actions, write your emails, etc. Also common is a belief that the thing to do is to become part of the capital-owning class as soon as possible since AI will supercharge wealth polarization even more than it already is.
All of which is to say — these people do not have our children’s best interests at heart. It all needs to be out of schools as soon as possible. More broadly: Our thinking is what makes us human. If we outsource that, what’s the point? (No wonder they don’t care about schools. They’ve given up on the future of the species, many of them.)
In developing knowledge of and experience with the use of AI, such as for research purposes, of how much of a machine it is, and a thinker it is not. In the end, a human should have to sign off on anything to propose it to be true.
I have surely seen the AI support a position, and then support the exact opposite position, and this can branch in multiple directions. I am reminded of what is needed to write a good research paper in 1950, or whenever, of that which has not changed. The best question I've ever asked an AI is, "What does the opposition say?" That is also the best question I have asked prior to the use of any AI. Tackling the topic from as many different angles as possible, and hunting down greater numbers of scenarios for context, with or without the machine, contributes the same quality to the result. Yes, the machine can wade through mountains of material in seconds, but only I can truly perform the high-level function, which will be to say that whatever is being said is ultimately true or false.
When you pull back the curtain of the screen, you are still left with a learning culture that has learned how not to learn. The learning culture is, and has always been, play deprived. That's why the temperament of young people is conditioned to gravitate towards the shiny things, the low-hanging fruit in the lives of everyone these days. The learning culture is a vacuum, a terrain of depleted soil where conversation could thrive if play propelled the classroom ecosystem the way it propels human intelligence. Play as a force of nature needs to be fully present in the hands and hearts of all the participants. An infrastructure composed of play -based communication is called for to make play central to the learning culture.
Hi Sophie. I worked in educational publishing for several decades. I came to it from the world of journalism. It was an absolutely wonderful experience that met a tragic ending: our company, an old and venerated one, was slowly destroyed by private equity. But that's another story. What surprised me was how fad-prone the field of education is. In the beginning, I would go to teachers conventions every year and every year the leaders in the field would be pushing another yet another new approach to teaching, often something involving the latest technologies. I grew very cynical pretty quickly and stopped going to the conventions.
Corporations have influenced schools for a very long time. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, wealthy industrialists began investing heavily in education.
Not because they funded everyday public schools directly through taxes—that remained primarily the responsibility of local and state governments—but because they shaped what schools taught and how they were organized. Major philanthropists included: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Their foundations financed:
Teacher training
Universities
School libraries
Vocational education
Educational research
Curriculum development
The Factory Model of Schooling
If we're still pretending that these philanthropists were simply trying to give back, we're being incredibly naive. Each of these men built their fortunes in industry, grooming immigrant adults and their entire families, how to behave in factory environment. This is when schools became organized around:
Bells
Fixed schedules
Grade levels
Standardized curriculum
Age grouping
Efficiency
Standardized testing
Large classrooms
The industrial model of education was never designed to cultivate independent, critical thinkers. It emerged during a period of rapid industrialization, when the economy demanded large numbers of workers who could reliably follow procedures, arrive on time, respect hierarchy, and perform standardized tasks. Schools increasingly mirrored factories: bells signaled transitions, students were grouped by age, learning was standardized, and success was measured by compliance and the ability to produce the "right" answers.
Critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging accepted ideas were not the primary objectives of this system. In many ways, they were inconvenient. Imagine a factory floor filled with workers who constantly questioned every instruction from an authoritarian supervisor. Efficiency—the defining goal of industrial production—would grind to a halt. The educational system evolved to support the needs of that economy, rewarding obedience, conformity, and consistency far more often than curiosity, creativity, or independent thought.
That doesn't mean every educator wanted to suppress independent thinking. Many exceptional teachers have always encouraged students to ask questions, explore ideas, and think for themselves. But the structure of the system itself was built around standardization rather than intellectual exploration and capacity. The result is a legacy that still influences education today, even as the skills most needed in the modern world—critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, and innovation—are the very qualities that standardized systems have often struggled to develop.
Many historians describe this as the "factory model." It mirrored industrial workplaces because that was considered the most efficient organizational system available. One well-known example was the Gary Plan, developed by William Wirt in the early 1900s.
Students rotated through:
Academic classrooms
Workshops
Gymnasiums
Auditoriums
This allowed schools to educate more students using the same buildings and reflected efficiency principles popular in industry.
Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. The work of Frederick Winslow Taylor greatly influenced schools. Taylor developed "scientific management," which emphasized:
Standardization
Measurement
Efficiency
Specialized roles
Productivity
School administrators adopted many of these management practices, although classroom teachers often adapted or resisted them.
Were Schools Designed to Create Factory Workers? This is one of the most debated claims and as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in schools, I struggle with the idea that this ideas is even debatable at this point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html
Schools were not created solely as factories for producing obedient workers. Industrial efficiency was one influence among several.
Who Actually Paid for Public Schools? The vast majority of funding has historically come from:
Local property taxes
State governments
Federal government (a much larger role after the mid-20th century)--also heavily influenced by corporations and their lobbyists.
Corporate "philanthropy" influenced educational policy and innovation and it's doing this today, pervasively.
Many features of today's schools reflect their 19th- and early 20th-century origins:
Age-based grades
School bells
Standardized testing
Fixed schedules
Uniform curricula
Seat-time requirements
If we hope to transform public education, we'll need to persuade the organizations with the greatest influence and resources—including major corporations—that investing in schools designed to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and human potential is also an investment in their own future.
Tomorrow's workforce will not be defined by how well people follow instructions. Increasingly, success will depend on the ability to think critically, solve novel problems, collaborate across disciplines, and innovate in ways machines cannot. These are the very capacities that flourish through the arts, music, design, theater, and other creative pursuits that have too often been treated as expendable rather than essential.
The same is true for physical well-being. An active body supports an active mind. Research continues to demonstrate the connection between movement, exercise, attention, emotional regulation, learning, and mental health. Recess should not be viewed as wasted instructional time, and physical education should no longer be treated as an afterthought. They are foundational to helping children develop into healthy, engaged, resilient learners.
The irony is that the very skills and capacities many employers now say they desperately need—creativity, adaptability, emotional intelligence, collaboration, resilience, and sound judgment—are often the first casualties when schools become narrowly focused on standardized testing and measurable outputs. If corporations truly want a future workforce capable of navigating complexity and driving innovation, they have a vested interest in supporting an educational system that develops whole human beings, not simply efficient workers.
I appreciate what you're saying. From the top of a big hierarchy, uniformity serves.
In an example from the article (LA), it took a citizen group to influence the school board in the right direction. More primary schools can be influenced more locally by parents/citizens. This is doable in an age where the general population appears to have no effect at a federal level. That would take national citizen organization - I think more likely, state-wide organization is doable.
Yes, I agree. Only, most parents these days, with both working, at least one job, maybe more, don’t have the space to dive into the PTA, or whatever it’s called these days, to advocate for these sense making changes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working in environments with undeserved children and heard the comment that “these parents just don’t care” far too many times to stomach.
Robert Putnam has well-documented the loss of community. Perhaps we can make a list of ways in which forming local groups can benefit our health.
In a quick search, I did find this and will share that I agree with this 100%—When I bought my first laptop (early adopter over 30 years ago), I envisioned a time when more people would be working from home than going to the office. Who knew Covid was coming and the surge of remote workers. As someone who came out of the womb organizing social communities, I pondered that this would then require a heightened sense of community because human beings need socialization and if people were not engaged at work, they would need to create other spaces. Then came co-working spaces and an abundance of coffee shops that somewhat fills this need, but I haven’t seen either, and I’ve belonged to two co-working spaces that I enjoyed, but they’re really missing the mark on intentional community as they center only on workspace and ways to grow a business…. and coffee shops, at least where I live, miss the mark altogether and as a business consultant, that’s a strange dynamic to witness. Every shop and co-working space would profit more by taking this on…. “Robert Putnam's theory centers on social capital—the idea that social networks, norms of reciprocity, and trust hold communities together and make democratic societies function. He famously argued that a decline in civic engagement and community involvement leads to poorer governance, increased polarization, and widespread social isolation.”
Thanks for your note. I’m not familiar with Putnam’s work, but I do know that a lot of scholars and others have written about the loss of community and I have tons of my own theories as well. I like the thought of there being local groups that are helpful. Say more.
And why did big tech participate in undermining the education system to abandon the common sense that children cannot change their sex? Might attempts to change kids' exterior appearance with drugs and surgeries be a really bad idea that spreads like a contagion harming families and society on a mass scale?
Sophie, this is exactly right, and there's a mechanism underneath it worth naming. Learning isn't information transfer, it's the slow cultivation of a rich, personally-threaded memory substrate: the "fibrous journey" you describe. Handwriting, paper, boredom, a teacher's eyes on you: these all force the child to do the threading themselves, latent to active, effortfully.
Unfortunately, I currently teach math online mostly for the past 6 years since covid. Autocomplete or a chatbot tutor doesn't help the child weave their own mind together, it substitutes an external one. The engagement mechanics you name (streaks, rewards) aren't a design flaw bolted onto good pedagogy, they're what happens when a system optimizes for attention capture instead of memory formation. Because I teach online, I rely mostly on grading notebooks, with lots of practice with pencil and paper. This is my workaround. And project-based learning.
Bring back the boredom. Bring back the books.
Threaded Mind: Consciousness as Ecological Fabric and Recursive Memory Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30505811
What a smart woman! She also happens to be a prominent member of the British Royal Family, yet unlike another actress member of that family who sells jam with her title, she never mentions it. That's because she is not an insecure arrivist.
Sophie — thank you for this essay. The engagement-metric slot-machine critique and the "personalized learning as depersonalized learning" quote from John Warner are two of the sharpest lines in the field this year, and I'll be citing both of you repeatedly.
For readers who stayed with the piece to the end: the products Sophie is describing — Chromebook autocomplete assistants, chatbot tutors on canonical content, engagement dashboards — are what I'd call controller architectures. AI deployed above the student, prescribing from outside. Complex Adaptive Systems theory of AI tutoring predicts they will fail exactly the way Sophie describes them failing: they fall into what my paper under review at BJET calls surface-compliance and mutual-capitulation attractors. Sophie's diagnosis is right; CAS names the mechanism.
There is a different architectural category — AI as constituent agent participating in a course's local rules, on a high-friction doer-effect substrate. My FIN 345 finance students at Ensign College compute CAMEL ratios by hand from raw 10-K filings; the AI persona works alongside them, not above them. It sustains the crawling phase Sophie rightly wants to protect.
Sophie's critique is required reading. The architectural alternative she may not have encountered is real, and it works.
— Chris Wasden, EdD
It's not only the low-level dopaminergic stimulation from the blue light that zaps and dazes us, it's also the transcranial magnetic stimulation from the "low-level" radiofrequency that many parents want to pretend does not exist.
Jonathan Haidt made an important contribution to the debate about childhood and social media. He recovered a genuine signal that had been obscured when researchers grouped together different technologies, different activities and different populations.
But I think he then made a more fundamental mistake.
He recovered the signal, but prematurely promoted it to the status of cause.
A stronger association between social media use and poorer mental health—particularly among adolescent girls—does not, by itself, identify the underlying mechanism. My reading of the evidence is that the more plausible biological pathway is sleep.
Social media is not a biological mechanism. Sleep disruption is.
Social media may delay bedtime, fragment sleep, increase emotional arousal and keep adolescents engaged at precisely the time the brain should be down-regulating. Poor sleep then affects attention, emotional regulation, reward processing, stress physiology and resilience. Social media may therefore be an amplifier acting on an already vulnerable developmental system rather than the primary cause of that vulnerability.
That distinction matters because it changes the questions we ask.
If social media is the cause, removing social media becomes the obvious solution.
If sleep is the pathway, we ask what social media is doing to sleep.
And if childhood itself has become biologically less resilient through reduced movement, diminished free play, poorer sleep, less autonomy and fewer face-to-face relationships, then social media may simply be exploiting a vulnerability that already exists.
This brings me to Sophie Winkleman's article.
I wonder whether the same conceptual expansion is happening again.
A signal about social media has gradually become an argument about screens.
Screens become devices.
Devices become EdTech.
EdTech becomes AI.
AI becomes Big Tech.
By the end of the article we are no longer discussing one scientific hypothesis. We are discussing an entire worldview.
Yet the central concepts are never defined.
What is education?
Is it communication?
Memory?
Knowledge acquisition?
Character?
Critical thinking?
Creativity?
Examination performance?
Becoming fully human?
These are not the same thing.
Nor is technology defined.
A pencil is technology.
A book is technology.
Printing is technology.
A calculator is technology.
A laptop is technology.
AI is technology.
These are different tools serving different purposes.
The article then moves effortlessly between screens, smartphones, social media, EdTech, AI, reading apps and gamification, as though they belong to the same conceptual category. They do not.
This is precisely the kind of confusion Wittgenstein warned about. Words drift between different language games without anyone noticing that their meaning has changed.
Take handwriting.
There is good evidence that handwriting can improve learning and memory.
But handwriting is also a method of communication.
Is it better than typing for communicating ideas? Usually not.
The endpoint has changed.
The same applies to reading.
Reading is an extraordinary cultural achievement, but it is evolutionarily recent. Humans learned through listening, observation, imitation and participation for hundreds of thousands of years before widespread literacy.
Why is reading assumed to be superior to listening?
Again, the endpoint has changed.
Even gamification is treated as though it were uniquely digital.
My teachers gave me stars, certificates, house points and prizes.
These were all reinforcement schedules.
The interesting question is not whether rewards exist, but which behaviours they reinforce and to what end.
As an immunologist, I was taught that before discussing causation we define our terms carefully. We distinguish the signal from the mechanism and the mechanism from the underlying biology.
I think psychology sometimes does the opposite.
It allows familiar words—education, technology, thinking, learning, engagement—to carry several meanings simultaneously. The argument remains persuasive because the words feel familiar, even though their meanings keep changing.
Signals point.
They do not explain.
Biology explains.
Jonathan Haidt helped recover an important signal.
The next step is not to build a larger narrative around it.
It is to ask what the signal is actually signalling.
While the following issue will likely require decades of longitudinal analysis, i suspect that some factors may become highly negatively impacted through abdication of cognitive processes induced by social and productive dependence upon AI, defined as chatbots, LLMs, and instant answers.
Nonliterate human groups equipped with efficient movement tech and weaponry, became a factor in cruel invasive violent intrusions (although groups like Alexander's Macedonian Hellenes 2300 years ago).
Consider the continual increase of invasive violence due to horse tech, and the much later trading of christian conversion for firearms, to previously solely demonstrative local adjacent tribal warri g, where very low lethality and wounding had been the norm.
Do the less literate and illiterate constitute a bloc of far higher incidence of Autocratic Submissives?
As the important variable visible to anthropologists appears to be proximity to outgroups, for exploitation ( the true lifelong slaves would appear to be result of easy transport of aggressors, even when slaves were not transported so easily), the combination of illiteracy may well be the most important causal factor in acceptance of slavery AND impulse to social dominance.
I have no noticed the socially dominant to be at all the intellectually dominant, even within local and US national political parties.
Top-down causation misattribution , the dissociation involving imaginary deities unquestioned yet invented and followed for obvious outgroup exploitation, subjugation, hierarchical acceptance, persists so long as failure to critically question one's own acquired delusions, occurs.
This is why my kids are going to classical hybrid school with very limited tech
Thank you Sophie for your powerful voice in this fight. EdTech and AI are also destroying the relationships that kids need with their teachers. “School connectedness,” which is driven by kids’ bonds with their teachers, not only promotes learning success but it also prevents kids from becoming depressed and suicidal. The last thing this increasingly depressed and suicidal generation of kids need is a screen that gets in the way of a real-world connection with a teacher. The first thing my kids talked about coming home from school was a story their teacher had told them. Such connections are what inspired them to do the hard work of learning. Every child deserves the opportunity to connect with a caring teacher, not an unfeeling laptop.
I think this is written by a knowledgeable person. I want to throw this angle in there. We have a rash of cases where there are emergency situations, and someone should dial 9/11, and people bust out there phones and film it instead. I see it looks like they view themselves as videographers, doing something useful, but also with later fallout, including either feeling shame in the following days for not actively participating, or by becoming more morally hardened.
In this sense, there is the question of what do screens do to the way we behave? We propose "cognitive offloading" in the case of information tools, which means we're not to remember anything. Plato didn't like the idea of writing for this reason, in a strongly oral time. I am also reminded of the US military's "information cockpit", which uses 7 screens that give context to the information being displayed, and increases memory retention by 55%, they say. I am reminded of reading a book, and remembering that something was halfway down the page on the left-hand side, maybe halfway through the book. That gives it a kind of context.
But screens are so much more of a way to fundamentally change our relationship with our world.
I believe, without checking that Plato merely recorded that Socrates advised against teaching writing.
He himself was literate. Socrates left no actual writings.
As i noted this way back in 9th grade i may be in error,but my memory ( moving often, i retain no Platonic materials) is that your comment concerning Plato is in error.
2 links to answer the question posed in this article:
https://www.specialneedsalliance.org/blog/ai-in-the-classroom-creating-new-opportunities-for-students-with-special-needs/
https://theirworld.org/resources-3/disabilities-and-technology-how-we-can-expand-inclusive-education-to-achieve-sdg4/
Just fyi, the Australian under 16 ban on social media has been a complete flop. The most recent figures show that close to 80% in that age group still manage unhindered access to these platforms one way or another. I’m afraid the genie is out of the bottle in our societies.