Techno-Authoritarianism Part Four: Edtech, Progressive Education, and What’s at Stake When AI Hype Becomes Education Policy

The techno-authoritarian focus on the education market and schooling in general is only partially explainable by profit motives. A proper analysis of the actions and motives of techno-authoritarians seeking to reshape schooling must also include ongoing efforts to undermine the democratic and liberal values at the heart of progressive pedagogy. Silicon Valley’s techno-authoritarian education technology providers have joined and amplified the struggle to shift schooling toward illiberalism, and there is a long arc of marketcraft by would-be technocratic “disruptors” of education vying for the many dollars taxpayers spend on public education. As such, any product they peddle, despite the enormous waves of marketing and hype, must be heavily scrutinized through the lens of the relationship between power and technology. The current darling of the edtech world is LLM-based AI chatbots, which, for Silicon Valley’s techno-authoritarian education technology providers, is a desperate bid to continue enriching themselves in a consumer electronics market with diminishing returns. It is also the latest iteration of the long quest to build and sell an oracular teaching machine, one that can relocate the locus of teaching and learning away from public schools and trained educators to the power centers of commercial tech. In the process, the purveyors of AI can capture billions of tax dollars intended for public schooling, steer the purpose of schooling toward the desires of capital, and create lifelong dependence in customers as young as preschoolers.

From Edison to Altman

In 1922, Thomas Edison declared, “I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”¹ 100 years later, in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.² Sam Altman, OpenAI’s founder, wrote in a 2024 blog post that “children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”³ Edison, whose studio had patented a film recording and projection system in 1891, fiercely fought to control the industry and had significant investments in film at the time of his predictions that film would greatly disrupt education.⁴ Edison’s lawyers filed numerous lawsuits seeking control of the movie industry. Edison founded the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC), a consortium of film producers, which enjoyed an intense but short-lived monopoly on the film industry that would be the envy of many current technology CEOs.¹ Although Edison suffered many legal setbacks in his efforts to monopolize the film industry (particularly when the MPCC ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act), by 1922, Edison viewed schools as a burgeoning market for the extensive film rental library he owned.¹

Despite Edison’s hopes and predictions, educators did not rush to adopt film in the classroom — the films created for classroom use were made with little input from educators, and teachers were skeptical of the film industry’s motives.⁵ Similarly, educators are trepidatious about the use of ChatGPT in the classroom and fear how its use could disrupt learning and lead to widespread cheating in schools.⁶ Edison saw a new market for his products in schools, an opportunity that served his own ambitions while neatly aligning with the new Visual Instruction Movement, led by progressive educators and reformers eager to leave the formalism dominant in education behind in favor of classroom aids that would enable students to enlist their senses in learning.⁷ Altman seeks “to build a brain for the world and make it super easy for people to use it for whatever they want.”⁸ The “brain” Altman speaks of includes ChatGPT, which he hopes will provide the aforementioned one-on-one tutoring to everyone, despite socioeconomic status.⁹

Edison’s focus on new education markets and Altman’s dreams of AI working alongside teachers in classrooms are neat bookends of the long, ongoing story of education technology. Unfortunately for Edison, in his lifetime, teachers could simply opt out of education technology they deemed useless, gimmicky, or distracting.¹ However, digital tools, such as email and learning management systems (LMS), are increasingly de rigueur in schools, requiring educators to develop the skills necessary to use them for everyday tasks, including grading, communication, and attendance.¹⁰ These digital tools almost exclusively emanate from one geographical, cultural, and political capital: Silicon Valley.¹¹ Far beyond Edison, the techno-authoritarians of Silicon Valley have amassed power on an unimaginable scale.

The sharp rightward turn of the techno-authoritarians of Silicon Valley informs their strong ideological and material interests in education and dovetails with an assault on education that reaches a new zenith in the second Trump Administration. The multi-decade far-right project to remake US education has culminated in the confirmation of Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling promoter, as Secretary of Education. McMahon gutted the department in order to destroy what the Heritage Foundation calls the department’s “bureaucratic deep state.”¹² In reality, via the roadmap the Heritage Foundation provided in Project 2025, McMahon intends to eliminate programs like Head Start and Title I, remove federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students and undermine federal capacity to enforce civil rights law, reduce funding for students with disabilities, and broadly expand universal private school choice.¹³ Project 2025 is both a treatise and a roadmap for Christian Nationalism, replete with attacks on transgender students and racially minoritized children and clear in its goals to protect parents’ “rights” while removing protections for anyone else by “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”¹³

With a public sphere eroded and public schooling under permanent assault, a clearly established dual educational model delivers progressive education to the children of elites, while a stultifying, rote curriculum bereft of any class analysis or time to consider alternatives prevails. A hollowed-out Department of Education remains. What is left? An educational system ripe for further plunder, with each student an atomized consumer whose only teacher is an AI chatbot. Professional educators, replaced by untrained docents whose sole duty is to manage a room full of students supervised by AI tutors, are further disciplined by the ruling class as they are slowly rendered obsolete.

Two Competing Visions of Education: One for Elites, and One for Everyone Else

Schools, particularly public schools, are both historical and functional anchors of a healthy public sphere. Henry Giroux, when discussing the value of the public sphere, states that “in its classical liberal form, rested in its definition and function as an instrument of political change and emancipation.”¹⁴ Giroux does not view radical pedagogy as the sole solution for aiding oppressed groups in their ongoing ideological and material struggles, but rather as a significant aspect of the overall public sphere in which those struggles unfold.¹⁴ Giroux understands schools as sites of powerful emancipatory relations as they provide “an ‘opening’ for revealing capitalist (and other oppressive ideologies),” while charging teachers with “developing a critical understanding of those political and economic interests outside of schools that directly infringe upon the process of schooling via policy enactments, the distribution of resources, and tax-cuts.”¹⁴ Giroux’s analysis helps explain why education and progressive pedagogy represent significant ideological and material threats to techno-authoritarianism and capitalism broadly. In other words, progressive educators must recognize the role schools play in the creation and maintenance of democracy, while understanding the threat posed by outside parties with illiberal financial and political interests.

An educational model that solely equips students with the narrow skills and experiences required to assume a life of meaningless toil is both hollow and does not foster the values of a functional and informed social democracy. John Dewey called for a humanist approach to education, necessary for the maintenance of democracy through curricula designed to do just that: “Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class.”¹⁵ Dewey’s words evoke widely publicized reporting that the techno-authoritarians of Silicon Valley do not allow their children to have unrestricted access to phones, tablets, or the internet.¹⁶ The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of the most sought-after schools in Silicon Valley and to which many CEOs and tech executives have enrolled their children, bans screen use for students under 11 years old and focuses on a holistic, progressive curriculum.¹⁷ Rather than exposing his children to the harms of social media, of which he is certainly aware,¹⁸ Mark Zuckerberg prefers that his children play outside and read Dr. Seuss books.¹⁷ The utilitarian instruction designed for the masses is one that techno-authoritarians are all too eager to provide in the form of AI tutors, mindfulness apps, and a life mediated by peripherals like virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs), while protecting their own children from such tools and ensuring that the schools they attend limit or ban them outright.

Critical Pedagogy vs the “Banking” Concept of Education

Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire articulated a powerful concept: the operation of modern schooling, particularly the relationship between teacher and students, frequently resembles that of banks.¹⁹ In this system, the teacher is a narrating Subject while students are listening Objects, and students are mere containers waiting to be filled until, as Freire describes:

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.¹⁹

Freire elaborates that this is a central contradiction in schooling, preserving an oppressor/oppressed relationship that mirrors the world outside of school.¹⁹ This contradiction must be addressed before any aspects of progressive schooling proceed, meaning that the educator must acknowledge this power dynamic in open dialogue with their students.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was strictly a theoretical concept in Freire’s lifetime.²⁰ Today, Large Language Model (LLM) driven chatbots are the latest incarnation of the banking concept of education technology, inundating classrooms. Many educators, perhaps initially resisting the encroachment of AI on education, are adopting an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude that presupposes that AI is an inevitable aspect of society and that AI use is a critical skill students must possess to succeed and thrive.²¹ In a July 2025 press release, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gleefully announced the creation of the National Academy for AI Instruction. The $23 million initiative, funded by partners Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, includes a brick-and-mortar training facility in Manhattan, NY, and professional development for educators on best practices for teaching with AI.²² Weingarten, commenting on the initiative, said:

AI holds tremendous promise but huge challenges — and it’s our job as educators to make sure AI serves our students and society, not the other way around. The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies, but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.²²

Explicit in Weingarten’s statement is that the burden of ensuring that AI benefits students and society rests on educators, not the companies that produce AI. Weingarten’s assertion that teachers have a direct, irreplaceable connection with students while also predicting that AI can enhance teaching and learning — provided educators can tame and place guardrails on AI — either ignorantly or purposely elides tech company’s motives behind the push to inundate schools with AI. What are those motives? In the same press release, Anthropic Co-founder and Head of Policy Jack Clark comments, “We’re at a pivotal moment in education, and how we introduce AI to educators today will shape teaching for generations to come.”²²

The motives driving Silicon Valley’s aggressive push to get AI into classrooms are at the heart of what many educators and AFT members see as a betrayal by Weingarten. Writing for Truthdig, Nolan Higdon calls the AFT-Silicon Valley partnership a Trojan horse, and clarifies that “AI companies aren’t trying to ‘help teachers.’ They’re trying to infiltrate public education, lock in long-term influence and normalize surveillance capitalism for the next generation.”²³ The Trojan horse is visible in the tech industry’s efforts to mine data from both students and teachers, define what AI is and how it should be used, and ideologically shape how teachers and students perceive AI.²³ That too supports a banking concept of education, according to Freire:

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation.¹⁹

Mining data from teachers and students is highly profitable, and tech companies are willing to break the end-user license agreements (EULAs) they themselves wrote to acquire it. In a class action lawsuit brought before the US District Court for the Northern District of California, parents of students enrolled in that district allege that Google LLC surreptitiously and illegally gathered data about their children without the permission of parents or school officials, amounting to gathering “thousands of data points that span a child’s life.”²⁴ The lawsuit alleges that Google LLC, through its Workspace for Education tool, which is used by a staggering 70% of schools in the United States, leverages a digital fingerprint embedded in the Chrome browser that tracks students, even when the student or school personnel uses tools designed to block such tracking.²⁴ While the activity this lawsuit describes was clandestine, AI tools in classrooms provide companies like Google with easy access to data that students and teachers willingly enter each time they interact with an LLM.

The “creative power” Freire mentioned is actively harmed and diminished by the use of LLMs. In a 2025 study exploring the neurological and behavioral effects of using LLMs to write essays, Kosmyna et al. found that using LLMs increased cognitive debt, a concept they define as “a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.”²⁵ The four-month study revealed many of the long-term negative consequences of using LLMs in an educational setting, with disturbing conclusions:

Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.²⁵

AI, in the form of chatbots powered by LLMs, undermines creativity, exposes users to data capture and eventual manipulation, and erodes democratic sense-making. AI, in this form, is the diametric opposite of what Freire discusses as an alternative to the banking concept of education: problem-posing education.

Problem-posing education front-loads the power dynamic that is the central contradiction of education, namely the teacher-student relationship, and recognizes each of them as cognitive actors.¹⁹ Problem-posing education reimagines the typical role of the teacher as authority and center of knowledge, while simultaneously altering the roles of both teachers and students — transforming them into teacher-student and student-teacher.¹⁹ Banking education stultifies creativity and creative power, but “problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality.”¹⁹ LLMs in classrooms will not foster problem-posing education. Viewing LLMs as an oracular center of truth will merely shift the typical banking model center of authority away from teachers and toward Silicon Valley. This shift is not solely about power; it is also a form of deskilling intended to obviate the need for teachers in classrooms and replace them entirely.

Techno-solutionist products, such as LLM chatbots, are heralded as the next great innovator and disruptor of education, fulfilling a cybernetic impulse to control and steer users. These tools collect vast amounts of user data as users enter prompts and answer questions. Decades of neoliberal policies, which defund some schools and underfund others, have led to austerity measures such as fewer faculty members teaching larger and larger classes. Teachers face overcrowded classrooms and incessant curricular pressures to center more and more of the school day on standardized test preparation. The scores of those tests, in turn, provide justification for “failing” schools. The solution? Privatization and edtech provided by Silicon Valley. As Marc Andreessen described in his 2023 essay entitled Why AI Will Save the World:

Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.²⁶

While many schools are debating policies governing the use of AI in classrooms or ways to ban its use outright, one school network is plowing forward with AI tutors replacing teachers and siloed, atomized learning experiences replacing socially constructed knowledge.

2hr Learning: Regressive Education, Constant Surveillance, and AI Classrooms

An AI-driven school network has garnered significant media attention in the last few years. Opened in 2014 under the for-profit company Legacy of Education, Alpha School, as of January 2026, operates campuses in Texas, Arizona, California, Florida, New York, and Virginia. Founded by social media influencer and podcaster MacKenzie Price, Alpha Schools employs a model she created, 2hr Learning, which, according to the 2hr Learning website, is a school day comprised of “an AI tutor that enables students to crush academics in just 2 hours a day and motivates them with the gift of time.”²⁷ Price, who studied psychology at Stanford and has no teaching background, refers to classrooms as “the next global battlefield” and is focused on the next skirmish in that war; Price recently established a new charter network called Unbound Schools.²⁸ Ecstatic about the prospects for her vision of education after Trump’s April 2025 executive order entitled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” Price posted a lengthy LinkedIn missive stating that the executive order “requires AI integration across ALL subjects,” “isn’t a scary mandate. It’s long-overdue momentum,” and that “[t]here’s never been a better time to be a teacher or a 5-year-old,” while invoking the specter of China and claiming without evidence that Alpha Schools students “perform in the top 2%.”²⁹ It is important to note that Alpha Schools do not employ teachers; they employ adult “guides” who “A.I.-led lessons free up” so they may “focus on motivating students instead of on time-intensive tasks like lesson planning and grading.”²⁸ However, some school districts are not convinced by Price’s approach. In January 2025, the Pennsylvania Department of Education denied Unbound Academy’s application to operate charter schools in the state, citing “multiple, significant deficiencies” in Unbound’s application and an absence of evidence that its educational methodology is effective.³⁰

On the 2hr Learning website, Price offers a similarly unconvincing evidence on the efficacy of the 2hr Learning model when she claims that traditional schools are “outdated, full of busywork, and sadly for our kids, often a waste of time” and that students who attend school which adopt her learning model will learn “twice as much in two hours per day as they would in six hours of traditional school.”²⁷ Alpha School students spend 25 minutes per day in each academic area (math, reading, language and writing, social studies, and science), with an additional 20 minutes of flexible time, and the rest of the school day spent working on projects or attending workshops.²⁷ Students interact exclusively with AI tutors during academic work time, alone as they jump from subject to subject, steered through the process via AI through what Price calls “speed bumps” and a “struggle detector,” with their progress and experiences assessed strictly by the AI tutor and the results of the NWEA MAP standardized test given multiple times per year.³¹ Not allocated in this academic block are any discussions with classmates, co-creation of knowledge, labs to reinforce concepts, or allowing students to experience a phenomenon firsthand. But Price cautions that 2hr Learning is not just about edtech:

2 Hour Learning is not magic software. Edtech constitutes only 10% of the solution, while 90% depends on having a motivated student. There are no academic teachers; Guides motivate and support students as they become self-driven learners. Additionally, by giving students their most valuable resource — time — back, they can spend the rest of the school day developing life skills through engaging workshops.³¹

Piloted by an AI tutor and measured by standardized testing, the 2hr Learner is alone in their absolute responsibility for any perceived successes or failures. Teachers, made obsolete and viewed as woefully outmoded, do not exist, having been value-engineered out of the school day. What is left is a student and an AI tutor — the former works without other humans and bears the entirety of the burden of academic success, while the latter watches every keystroke, unable to truly think, feel, or know, using pattern analysis algorithms and inference in its role as the lone educator and companion.

While some parents were attracted to the promises of Alpha Schools and the 2hr Learning model, the day-to-day reality exposed an unhealthy school environment that was anything but what was initially promoted by school leadership. A detailed 2025 investigation by Wired magazine into Alpha Schools describes a toxic, zero-sum learning environment that is anything but what Alpha’s glitzy marketing materials promise to prospective parents. Parents of a student at the Brownsville, Texas, location sought medical advice from a pediatrician due to their child’s unexplained weight loss — they discovered that guides denied their child food until she completed specific learning metrics on the math learning tool IXL.³² Appalled, the student’s parents removed both of their children from the school in November of that school year. Upon enrolling their child, parents must opt in to a wide array of surveillance tools used to monitor and manage Alpha students, and in one shocking case, found that their child was being surveilled by the school laptop even when in her bedroom at home.³² Flagged by Alpha’s management surveillance software for non-productive behavior while talking to her younger sister in her bedroom, “Alpha’s system sent a video of her in her pajamas, taken from the computer’s webcam, that showed her talking to her younger sister.”³²

“We are not the individual subjects of AI but the inferential subjects of AI. The shared structural characteristics picked up by AI are predictive, and therefore ‘efficient’, in the same way that gender is predictive of lower pay, or race is predictive of likelihood to be stopped by police while walking down the road. It’s pattern recognition as self-reinforcing social profiling.”³³ -Dan McQuillan

Like all edtech, AI can either be a useful resource that helps foster progressive education or a hostile, consumerist product that undermines it. What matters is who builds edtech and for what purpose. Educators and policymakers cannot simply take what edtech providers promise at face value — we have to be critical and canny advocates for progressive and effective learning tools, not overly hyped gimmicks that will only worsen inequality and preserve current class hierarchy. 

***Next: In the final piece in this series, I’ll discuss alternate edtech imaginaries, some drawn from existing liberatory technology movements and some that we must collectively design, build, and use.

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