Continuing on the topic of AI, how much would you pay to have a bot teach your kids?

The pitch by Alpha School is as innovative as it is sensational: For $65,000 a year, students study for just two hours a day using adaptive apps and personalized lesson plans and spend their afternoons on life skills such as learning to ride a bike or financial literacy.

Instead of teachers, the students have “guides.” The AI-driven school, which is coming to Northern Virginia this fall and plans to enroll up to 25 students in grades K-3 at a campus near Dulles International Airport, sits at the intersection of two growing spaces in education: alternative schooling and an explosion of online learning platforms used in nearly every corner of the education sphere, from public school classrooms to at-home supplement work.

I do agree with the co-founder of Alpha School: “What we realized is that kids do not need to sit in class all day doing academics.”.

Beyond that, I rather doubt she defines “learning” the same way most teachers would.

And that’s just the start of what I find wrong with this approach.

Let’s start with the fact that the concepts being applied are little different from the hundreds of proposals for “personalized” learning that have been developed in just my lifetime. Audrey Waters did an excellent job of covering many of them in her 2021 book “Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning”, and I highly recommend it.

Just in the past twenty years, plenty of other tech billionaires – with names like Gates and Zuckerberg – have spent lots of money on failed attempts to “revolutionize” school with artificially intelligent systems. Emphasis on the artificial. And failed.

Back in the previous century, I helped an elementary school install an expensive program called SuccessMaker that was supposed to personalize learning for the students. It had many of the traits found in Alpha School, including the idea that real learning is mostly about memorization and passing multiple choice tests.

I also have to wonder what the parents who are paying 65 grand are doing to their kids. At that age, play, experimentation, and interaction with other human beings is far more important than whatever will be presented on those screens.

Now I have no doubt that this approach to learning will appeal to some parents with far more money than sense. The proprietors of this school will very likely find two dozen families willing to have their kids participate in this experiment.

However, no matter how much success they claim, all based on standardized test scores of course, this is not the “future” of school.

It certainly isn’t what real learning looks like.

When I Googled “robot teacher”, so many of the images looked like the characters from the Will Smith movie “I, Robot”, that I decided to just go with the original. That face is only slightly less scary than those of the bots writing on a chalkboard.