With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes. Unguided use of AI systems may actively deskill students and teachers

Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it. A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only... See more

But education, as we have organized it, was already drifting away from the cultivation of judgment, taste, historical sense, and imagination. AI didn't cause that drift, but made it impossible to ignore. And real learning has rarely been a mass phenomenon. It has always required a component of cognitive friction.