2025/08/12

AI Adoption in Education Fuelled by Hype, not Outcomes, Tressie McMillan Cottom Warns

“Most of the promotion of A.I. in schools boils down to: Well, it’s happening, and so students need to know. But there’s nothing attaching it to learning outcomes. There’s nothing assessing its risk to privacy, to data, to the mental and emotional and cognitive development of students. That’s actually what education is supposed to do.”
– American writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, on the “illusion” that AI will revolutionize the classroom. Propped up by “outsize” cultural and political power, AI is just the latest in “a long continuum of technologies that promise to transform education,” McMillan Cottom tells Meher Ahmad and Jessica Grose.
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