Still on this topic: The Daily, Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow–a conversation with NYT’s technology reporter Natasha Singer:
I’m working on a book right now about the decade-long push for computer science and now AI in schools, and one of the things I’ve learned from doing historical research is that this is a pattern of the tech industry, of pushing school reforms. And it’s always the latest hyped thing that’s urgent for schools to teach, and schools respond.
And we want schools to respond because we want kids to be able to use the technology of the day, and we want kids to be able to learn the subjects that are the most important of the day, and that help them navigate their worlds and get jobs. But at the same time, tech companies have outsized influence in schools, and we have bowed to tech industry education agendas in school without a lot of public discussion or independent scrutiny. And if you think about other industries, we don’t let big pharma companies like Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson tell high schools what to teach in biology.