I don't remember being an elementary school student and thinking, like, okay, this is what I'm doing to learn how to do a job, right?

You're there to be educated.

And we as a society, as a K-12 profession, we need to have that conversation and figure that out.

I personally don't think of education as job training, but I think so many people do now that it's a situation that we need to resolve.

And I don't know that thinking of it as job training is the most child-friendly answer to that question. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tom Mullaney.

Tom is a high school teacher who teaches social studies in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

And Tom has been writing a lot about generative AI in schools, you know, has been talking about this.

Certainly, we ran into one another on blue sky, which is where I started to get to know him and his work and, you know, get to know his

opinions on this, right? And I was thinking about doing an episode on generative AI in education

for quite some time. And then I was reminded recently when there was a New Yorker article,

but also some listeners asked for an episode on this. And I said, yeah, I need to reach out to Tom.

We need to finally kind of do this episode, understand what is going on, have this discussion.

And I was really happy he could make the time because I think that we had a great and wide-ranging chat where certainly we talked about generative AI in education and what that means for students, how students are using it,

but also what it means for teachers and school districts. And we extend that conversation as well

to talk about the use of digital technology more broadly, how that has been pushed for the

past couple of decades, you know, what that actually means for schools and teachers and students,

you know, going from kind of Google schools and teachers and students, you know, going from

kind of Google and Google classroom and their reliance on those sorts of tools, but also,

you know, how teaching and how education has changed over the past number of years, and how

that's tough on both students and teachers alike. And these tech companies really take advantage of it to push their products and make it seem like they're going to make things easier and more efficient while really, you know, they're just getting data, getting information, getting money, certainly.

And, you know, does that really work for us?

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