I Thought She Shut Down The Education Department

Trump’s education secretary referred to artificial intelligence as “A1”—like the popular steak sauce—instead of “AI” during a panel on AI in education.https://t.co/iiCBVEEuGY

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) April 10, 2025

Why does she still have a job?

BTW: computers became ubiquitous in the classroom in this century.  IIRC, our school district started supplying them to students after the Golden Child graduated high school, so circa 2010. PC’s, as we used to call them, had been around for quite a while before that. 

I know why people are pushing AI for everything (and no, I don’t just mean Elmo): they want to be in on the next Microsoft/Apple. Best way to do that, they think, is to invest in AI and promote the hell out of it. Pretty much the way they did with Tesla, because electric cars were the next Macintosh.

And then it turned out Elmo wasn’t the next Steve Jobs.  (I’ve been seeing a reference to an article on how Jobs invested in his people and company, rather than contract, in the 2008 financial crisis. He brought Apple out of that to greater success with the iPad. Elmo laid off almost everybody at Twitter, and then forced Tesla to make his vanity project: an ugly thing he mockingly called a truck, and not enough people want one to even cover the investment in making them. None of his other cars have changed a whit, either. Apple has made, sold, and discarded more types of products than Elmo has ever sold.)

AI will be what it will be, but its place in the classroom won’t be clear for decades. I was the generation that took standardized tests (to this day I’m an expert at filling in the bubble); learned to speed read with machines (a useless skill I no longer have); watched “film strips” (“DING!”) and movies (“Our Friend The Atom”), stared at screens illuminated by opaque projectors and overhead projectors, and even cleaned chalk dust from erasers (without masks!😷)

My daughter wouldn’t recognize any of that, or really know what I was referring to. Most of it was a legitimate attempt to improve education. “Smart boards” were the new thing last I looked (but not in the college where I taught for 20 years).  A lot of the technology we used in public schools was just to keep us quiet and entertained across the absurdly long school day. The more time I spent teaching, the more I thought the school day was mostly for babysitting. College has you in class a few hours a day. So do the early grades of school. But then we decide students need to spend 8 hours there. Why? So they can stand it in an office? I still don’t have a better reason than that.

AI may have a place in the classroom someday, but not now. I’m encountering AI in my daily life, and I can smell it a mile away. It isn’t thinking, it’s just aping human communication (poorly) to keep people from doing such grunt work (or rather, to not have to pay people). AI in the classroom would not be much better than having first graders helping in college lecture halls; except AI wouldn’t get bored. 

It wouldn’t think, either. So, what’s the point?