Can a Robot Teach Like a Robot?

For the past 50 years, at least, the Direct Instruction mafia has lobbied, twisted research findings, and created or supported a host of conservative "think” tanks (with lots of influence and much less expertise to match) to advance an antiquarian chain gang method of scripted instruction, aimed at black, brown, and poor kids in underfunded public schools. 

These marginalized schools are increasingly segregated and the families whose children attend them are increasingly the victims of economic and governmental policies that have achieved steroidal growth in income inequality over this same 50 year time period.  These two factors, segregation and income inequality, are the chief reasons for the continuing achievement chasms that persist and that, in turn, help reformers rationalize even harsher measures that further isolate and dehumanize poor kids with the lockdown no excuses approach enhanced by Direct Instruction.

If it weren't all about the conscious and unconscious bias, cruelty, control, and racism enmeshed in the Direct Instruction phenomenon, there are quite simple policy solutions to the sharp differences in achievement levels.  And if states and/or the feds would focus on these three policy initiatives—socioeconomic integration, expansion and permanent extension of the SNAP benefits and the  earned income tax credit (EITC), and high-quality universal pre-K— the achievement gaps would begin to shrink immediately and continue to shrink over time, while the feudal remonstrations by Direct Instruction advocates against humane, inclusive, inquiry-based learning could be properly told to ship out!

Back in the disturbing unreality of our current fascist milieu, however, the Skinnerian excesses of Direct Instruction continue to be the chosen schooling method by reformers (see this excellent documented critique) and the politicians they own for poor and marginalized populations. It is cheap, isolating, appropriately oppressive (designed by the privileged for marginalized students in need of the most stringent control measures), and parrot learning often produces at least temporary gains on test scores (the racist and classist proxy for learning that can be waved about as proof that robotic methods are the best for teaching poor kids). 

Most importantly, perhaps, for those that push Direct Instruction, DI is a method that requires no evidence of thinking beyond the most basic comprehension, few questions and fewer interations with others, and no creativity or thinking outside the box. In short, it is the perfect training for jobs that require workers to follow orders, keep their mouths shut, and to accept their failure (if it occurs) as faults of their own. 

But in these days robots, when tech bros have wet dreams about having their “minds” uploaded into an AI supercloud, robots have come a long way. Robots of today no longer speak in a mechanistic monotone or walk like Boris Karloff in the old Frankenstein movies. 

Witness the one below strolling with Melania, who does her best runway approach, while the robot beside her walks with only a slightly human uncertain lurch, sort of like Melania’s husband approaching a stairway.

And how about 1950s travelogue background music! This shiny plastic Figure 3, the robot with the innocent voice of a 9th grade Valley girl reading her book report, is among the latest AI product lines from Silicon Valley.  Melania, who calls Figure 3 “Plato,” would like “Plato" and its clones to replace teachers in high poverty schools in need the best robot teachers that Silicon Valley can produce.  Those would be the same schools discussed above, the most segregated and disadvantaged ones that middle class parents would never allow Nora and Ezra to even know about, much less attend.  

The leafy suburban publics and the expensive privates need talented humans, rather than robots, who actually engage the Socratic method (preferably, without any technology), which was Plato’s (the real one) method of instruction.  While the plastic and silicon Plato can dispense more facts and concepts than any million students could ever regurgitate, the nurturing of a real dialogue with children in order to spark emotion and creativity is another matter.  We may hope, at least, these regiments of plastic “Platos" have at least been debugged enough so that children aren’t instructed in various suicide techniques.

Sure, it will be expensive to replace a couple million teachers with Figure 3s, but think of all the billionaire ideological advantages and the savings that will accrue when corporate ed reformers can eliminate educators and their salaries, retirement, and other benefits. Wow, just wow!

As for the disciples of direct instruction? Would the flawless universal delivery of DI instruction to every marginalized child in every underfunded segregated school in America be the equivalent of the pedagogical Rapture?  Or would the potential obliteration of the lucrative DI empire built on vast consulting networks and textbook/software product lines turn DI worshippers into devout skeptics?