Artificial intelligence and the technological turn of public education privatization: In defence of democratic education

Kenneth J Saltman

doi:10.14324/lre.18.2.04

Abstract

This article considers how the development of for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) technologies fosters the privatization of public education and erodes the values and practices of democratic education. The introduction situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of the structural economic and ideological shifts of the past 40 years. Such changes include neo-liberal restructuring, the repressive school and social turn, changes in the use of positivist ideology in schooling, the role of new technologies in social and cultural reproduction and changing imperatives for capital accumulation. The article illustrates different uses of AI as part of the technological turn of public education privatization. Examples include: (1) adaptive learning technology, and transformations to teacher work and conceptions of knowledge and learning; (2) biometric pedagogy and the cultural politics of locating learning in the body; and (3) the convergence of impact investing and digital surveillance technologies. The article considers how changes in the ownership and control over different aspects of public education relate to the cultural politics of knowledge and learning. It also examines how, under the guise of disinterested objectivity and neutrality, particular class and cultural ideologies and interests are promoted through new technologies, with significant pedagogical, cultural, economic and political implications. The article concludes by arguing that AI education is a site of cultural and political contestation and must be comprehended as a form of representational politics. By showing a critical pedagogical AI project, the article suggests that the anti-democratic tendencies of most AI education is hardly inevitable or determined, but rather represents a replication of long-standing ideologies.

Highlights

Contemporary concerns about the nefarious tendencies of artificial intelligence (AI) technology have become widespread in public and popular cultural discourse
I consider the ways in which AI continues long-standing trends through the promotion of: adaptive learning technology and transformations of teacher work and conceptions of knowledge and learning; biometric pedagogy and the cultural politics of locating learning in the body; and the convergence of impact investing and digital surveillance technologies
Mainstream criticism of adaptive learning technology points out that evidence does not exist for its efficacy as measured by standardized test scores (Boninger et al, 2019: 10), and that it represents a form of privatization and commercialism by shifting control over curriculum and pedagogy from teachers and schools to for-profit corporations

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary concerns about the nefarious tendencies of artificial intelligence (AI) technology have become widespread in public and popular cultural discourse. Mainstream criticism of adaptive learning technology points out that evidence does not exist for its efficacy as measured by standardized test scores (Boninger et al, 2019: 10), and that it represents a form of privatization and commercialism by shifting control over curriculum and pedagogy from teachers and schools to for-profit corporations. In the case of educational privatization, the standardization and homogenization of curriculum, pedagogical approaches and school models aim to maximize the possibilities of profit through ‘economies of scale’, and by automating and displacing the most expensive element of schooling: teacher labour While this tendency for standardization and homogenization of knowledge has been common with for-profit educational management organizations such as Edison Learning, saving money by using mass-produced curricula, it continues with AI. Democratic schooling would foster a culture of schooling in which knowledge is comprehended in relation to broader questions of power and politics, in which claims to truth are comprehended in relation to broader social antagonisms, and in which knowledge and learning as social products are seen as forming socially constituted selves

Conclusion

Notes on the contributor