AI Schools and the New Child Labor

This Element examines AI in schooling as a new form of child labor. It analyzes how educational platforms extract value from student data, automate and reorganize teaching through AI schools, and reshape education around corporate interests. It also assesses the prospects for critical, democratic uses of digital technologies.

This Element analyzes the expansion of artificial intelligence in schooling as the emergence of a new form of child labor. The first section theorizes digital educational privatization, demonstrating how AI platforms extract value from student activity by converting learning into data production, extending standards-and-accountability reforms, deskilling teachers, and normalizing surveillance. The second section examines the rise of AI schools, focusing on Alpha School as a case through which teacher labor is automated, corporate culture is installed as pedagogy, and schooling is reorganized around profit, techno-utopianism, and anti-democratic assumptions. The third section explores the possibilities and limits of critical AI education. While arguing that AI systems cannot themselves enact critical pedagogy, it identifies conditions under which digital technologies may be repurposed to support critical and democratic education. Drawing on activist and investigative projects such as Forensic Architecture, the book argues for teachers as cultural workers capable of developing technological practices that resist labor extraction and expand critical, public, and democratic education.