AI in schools – The choice we keep making
The article argues that education repeatedly falls for technological sales pitches that promise efficiency but fail to replace the essential role of skilled, present teachers. Historical examples like television instruction and MOOCs demonstrate that while technology reshapes other industries, it has not improved the core educational relationship or reduced costs without diminishing quality. The author warns that the current push for AI in schools is likely to follow this same pattern of overpromising and underdelivering, urging educators to prioritize human connection over vendor claims.
- ▪Previous educational technologies like television and MOOCs failed to replace in-person instruction due to poor completion rates and a lack of personal connection.
- ▪The author admits to past mistakes, such as installing expensive smart boards that teachers ultimately rejected in favor of traditional whiteboards.
- ▪Unlike manufacturing or banking, technology has not successfully made the core relationship between a teacher and students cheaper or more effective.
- ▪Companies promoting educational technology often prioritize their own economic gain over the actual pedagogical needs of classrooms.
- ▪The article suggests that the current adoption of AI in schools is likely to be another instance of prioritizing efficiency over the human element of education.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Friends School |
| Canonical URL | https://friendsschoolboulder.org/the-choice-we-keep-making/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:55:39 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T23:03:46.683Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T23:03:46.683Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HPrLoFoVxSZh · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Every time a new technology arrives, it finds its way into education, and every time, we are handed the same choice: listen to the people trying to sell it to us, or listen to teachers.We’ve done this before. In the 1950s and 60s, television was going to be the answer. School districts wired classrooms for broadcast so a single “master teacher” could deliver a lesson to hundreds of classrooms at once. It was pitched exactly the way every new education technology gets pitched: as a way to reach more kids, more consistently, for less money. It didn’t hold up.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Friends School.
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