Why MAGA fears human teachers

One thing Donald Trump‘s White House knows how to do is put on a spectacle so unsettling it is sure to grab attention. So it was last week when Melania Trump walked the red-carpeted hallway, dressed all in an all-white suit — accompanied by a white humanoid robot. The image, reminiscent of a wedding, quickly went viral, driven by jokes about how the First Lady had finally met someone with her own emotional caliber and how Figure 03, as it is called, was a step up from her husband. But as odd as the images were, what Melania Trump was selling was even worse: a GOP proposal to replace human teachers with robots.

“Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,’” she told attendees. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history.”

Welcome to the latest front in the Republican war on schools. 

For decades, the GOP has been leading an assault on public education. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gripe was “stick to reading, writing and ‘rithmetic,” which implies hostility toward expanding those lessons to more complex ideas like literary analysis, critical thinking, and higher math and sciences. This talking point, which implies that no one needs more than a fifth grade education, fell out of favor as more kids began going to college. The shape of the complaints may have shifted. But conservatives have clung to arguments about providing students with a “classical education,” which essentially means not teaching anything that wouldn’t have been found in a 19th-century classroom. They have pushed “school choice,” which has the end goal of funneling money out of public schools and into religious schools run by fundamentalist Christians. They have also championed homeschooling. Most recently, we saw the rise of Moms for Liberty, a group whose name hides its real aim: to redefine censorship as “parents’ rights” with the goal of removing books that portray people of color, women and LGBTQ people as deserving of full rights and dignity.

The right’s war on public education has always been rooted in fear that kids will learn empathy, curiosity and critical thinking skills — all of which could lead to them questioning, or even challenging, authority. But while some right-wing radicals, especially in the homeschooling world, do fantasize about ending public schools altogether, there’s a begrudging acceptance in the GOP that it’s nearly impossible to work and live as an adult in a 21st-century economy without a level of knowledge and skills that only trained educators can provide. This has given rise to a persistent fantasy of finding a way to circumvent the role of the teacher and instead download literacy, math and other basic skills into students, without teaching them all the analytical skills that provoke independent thought.

Artificial intelligence can access documents. But despite being labeled with the term, it doesn’t have the intelligence to analyze them. Still, many on the right have identified this as a solution to their conundrum. Since admitting that out loud is politically untenable, Republicans are being stealthy with their framing. Robots, Melania Trump insisted, can teach “deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities.” But as the machines possess neither of those qualities, it’s unlikely they would be able to impart them in a classroom.

“Students learn ‘critical thinking’ so that they can express ideas about the things they study in persuasive and compelling ways to and for other humans,” said Maeve Adams, an assistant professor at Lehman College who directs the school’s first-year composition program. “When we learn critical thinking with and from other humans, we cannot easily forget that humans are on the receiving end of the ideas we communicate.”

Adams pointed to social media platforms like X as evidence that machines “can easily short circuit our sense of human accountability and responsibility.” But critical thinking, she said, “is an essentially social activity that requires we be accountable to other humans.” AI might do a good job at imitating language. But the user “isn’t stupid,” Adams explained — they know it’s a machine without “human needs and feelings” and can’t foster “the sense of human accountability” that is crucial to true critical thinking.

The dishonesty is endemic in the Republican efforts to hype AI as a substitute to human-led learning. After visiting the expensive Alpha School, which replaces traditional classrooms with kids sitting in front of computers being taught by AI, Education Secretary Linda McMahon insisted on Fox Business earlier this month that “they’re not replacing teachers.” But while humans are on hand in Alpha Schools as “guides,” internal documents leaked to journalist Emanuel Maibert of 404 Media found that the goal of the schools is to have “no humans in the loop.”

Donald Trump’s executive order to promote AI in schools argued that the tech “sparks curiosity and creativity” and “will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills.” A recent Brookings Institute report, though, showed the opposite: that kids who use a lot of AI “are not thinking for themselves,” as Rebecca Winthrop, one of the study’s authors, told NPR. “They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.”

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This is bad for kids. But for MAGA, an authoritarian movement that depends on people struggling to understand others’ points of view, it has an undeniable appeal.

As dystopian as the image of Melania Trump and her robot friend were, what is scary is that Alpha and other AI-education proponents are good at marketing the notion that the developing technology will help kids socialize. The argument is that students will spend a couple of hours a day downloading the curriculum into their brains using a computer, which will free up the rest of the day for physical activity, group projects with other students and other pro-social behaviors. On its surface, this feels like it could work. After all, traditional education requires students to sit still and read books; how different could a computer be? And if it works faster, that would be great.

But, as Maibert’s reporting showed, educational AI has all the same problems as ChatGPT or other AI chatbots most of us have encountered. Educational AI, he told journalist Taylor Lorenz, generated “false information” or “illogical questions, illogical texts.” If not for the humans on hand — the ones they eventually want to get rid of — the students would be lost in confusion.

Unlike AI, books are written by people, who bring to the writing human understanding and context that technology can’t access. Teachers, in helping students understand the books, share a humanity that allows them to connect the information to their lives. AI can imitate some of that process, but it cannot truly replicate it.

Parents should also be skeptical that the GOP’s goal is to free up time for kids to do more community-based activities. While classrooms may not be fun, they are indisputably a communal experience. As Slate’s Rebecca Onion pointed out, Melania Trump explicitly dangled the promise that AI teachers would allow parents to forgo school for homeschooling, “completely replacing the ‘woke’ public school teachers who insist on ‘pushing’ social-emotional learning and various other progressive ‘agendas.’” Homeschooling would mean taking students out of the peer group a school provides.

“Social-emotional learning” is pedagogical jargon for the school’s role in teaching kids social skills, and it’s become a demonized concept on the right. They’re not wrong that kids who learn basic lessons like “respect others” at school might start extrapolating to forbidden ideas on the right, like “bigotry is bad” and “Donald Trump is immoral.” But while it may have a new term, social-emotional learning has always been a vital function of education. It’s why schools have clubs, sports and school dances, instead of, well, strapping every kid to a computer that tries to download basic knowledge and skills they will need to perform job tasks, but offers them nothing about relating to others, which are often called “soft skills.”

Most parents instinctively understand this, which is why AI is being hyped as a way to give kids more socializing-at-school time. But the pandemic’s disruption of education suggests that trying to separate “hard” and “soft” skills from each other may not be so easy. No one doubts that kids lost valuable time in learning their social skills when kept at home during the pandemic, but kids also saw a marked decline in math and reading skills. It suggests the skill sets are intertwined in hard-to-measure but important ways.

Human knowledge is not a discrete entity like a file on a computer. Humans are social animals. We learn and retain information far better if it’s in a social context — where the information has meaning that we can relate to our lives. If it were just a matter of sitting in isolation, walking through the material on our own, then books by themselves would have been enough throughout history to educate people.

Kids are entitled to a well-rounded education that teaches them to be better people, not just parrot information. Knowledge without thinking has long been a right-wing dream, but it’s incompatible with how human brains actually work. We need each other to give information context and meaning — to have teachers. AI is a shiny new toy, but it can’t dislodge this basic reality of human psychology.