"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by
New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," according to their review:
Thirteen years ago, Partovi... delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn't learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a similar playbook.
Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar.
"We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there's this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them... And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids' compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there's a different climate.
And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say "We've partnered with OpenAI." "We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School," or "We've partnered with Microsoft, and we're going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot." It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.
One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?
Two Slashdot posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book's "Acknowledgements" section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).
Ironically, one member of Amazon's "Vine" program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and apparently misunderstood its topic, writing that it made coding "feel approachable and even fun... [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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