Dumbing Down the Country
Ed tech companies claim that artificial intelligence can work educational miracles in our schools. Welcome to the can-can dance of AI in education.
Like Moulin Rouge dancers, the ed tech companies make fancy promises like high-kicking dancers in frilly skirts and petticoats. The swish and swirl of dresses with quick glimpses of legs and thighs dazzle the viewer. Every advertisement says what AI can do, what it might do, but not what it actually does in the classroom. From Ed Spaces, an Ohio-based company that serves the ed tech industry through conferences and web newsletters, here are some of the ed tech can-can steps orchestrated to hype AI:
AI systems can analyze a student’s learning style and pace.
AI can dramatically increase efficiency in educational settings.
AI tools can significantly enhance accessibility in education.
By leveraging learning analytics, AI can help identify students at risk of falling behind, allowing teachers to intervene early and provide necessary support.
New teachers are also being taught the can-can. Below, some recommendations from the College of Education University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:
[AI] can foster critical thinkers.
It can make abstract concepts more understandable.
It can be used to personalize learning
You can find similar can-can teasing all across the AI universe from companies like Aegis Softtech, Power School, Canva Magic Write, Google Classroom, and hundreds more. Of course, these are marketing pitches, trying to build a market and create a sense of AI inevitability. Can it be working?
Schools are being flooded with artificial intelligence and educational technology at rapid rates and rising costs. In 2025, industry analyst Market.us.Scoop reported that ed tech usage among K-12 schools increased by 99% since the year 2020. Many schools hustled to implement ed tech — particularly online learning platforms — during the pandemic, and the fact that usage remains high is, in part, because schools have kept the budget line item. In 2022, U.S. schools spent $5.076 billion on ed tech, according to K-12 Dive, which also predicts that spending on eLearning by schools will grow to $170 billion in the next five years. Furthermore, according to the business research platform Crunchbase, ed tech is being marketed in the U.S. by 1,385 companies. In 2024, Education Week counted more than 9,000 education technology products being sold to schools.
The ed tech companies are pitching potential results to schools, not data driven success. Why aren’t they soliciting testimonials from teachers actually using AI in the classroom? Most don’t, probably because 25% of teachers believe that AI is harmful, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall of 2023. In the same survey, only 6% of teachers believe that AI created more benefit than harm.
In 2023, Education Week interviewed teachers and administrators to understand the impact of AI in the classroom:
Students are having many more mental health issues which stem partly from technology/social media. AI will only make this worse — students need to accomplish things on their own to feel proud and build confidence. Students need to be taught to think and problem solve for themselves.
— District Administrator for Student Services, Iowa
I believe students already have too many readily available resources, such as answers to tests, essays, reports, etc. AI just makes it even easier for students to gain answers without gaining knowledge.
— High School Teacher, Missouri
AI will make it where people are totally dependent upon it. Students need to learn how to think, solve problems, and make decisions based upon facts not what AI says. We are dumbing down our country when we take away the skills needed to make wise decisions.
— District Administrator for Curriculum/Instruction, Arkansas
Technology is hindering students' ability to think critically and mathematically. They think the computer should find the answers for them, through Google or some other app. They have become reluctant to write formulas and problems down. They need to interact with the numbers and formulas more. Students and parents complain that six to eight math problems a day is too much for the students to do, and my district discourages the assigning of homework. What does that teach children about adulthood?
— Middle School Teacher, Massachusetts
I don’t know which statement is more alarming: students expecting Google or AI to give the answers or parents complaining about homework loads or districts discouraging homework. It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain learns. Students need to “think critically,” “gain knowledge,” and “problem solve,” which takes practice. Instead, as the Arkansas curriculum administrator said, “We are dumbing down our country.”
—
Stanislas Dehaene, Professor of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the College de France, writes about “four pillars of learning.” The first is paying attention — the conscious activation of neural circuits to “select, amplify, and propagate” information. Next the learner must actively engage with the information by forming hypotheses, making connections, and asking questions. Dehaene then cites “error feedback,” or verification of accuracy, as a crucial step. The final pillar is “consolidation.” The learner must use the new information repeatedly, which strengthens the neural, synaptic connections. Synaptic connections are strengthened through practice.
Learning is not passive. It requires individual engagement that changes the structure of the brain. As neuroscientist Michael Merzernich, said in Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows:
Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability.
The neural structural differences are most obvious in brain scans of people with specialized skills, such as musicians, athletes, chess players, and even cab drivers.
For example, right-handed violinists bow with the right hand and articulate the notes with the left hand. Brain scans of these violinists show a larger primary motor cortex on the right side of the brain — which controls the left hand. The motor cortex for the right hand is normal compared to non-musicians. Even adults just learning the violin exhibited the same difference in motor cortex size.
In another study, non-musicians were given a brain scan and then taught to play a simple melody on the piano. They were split into two groups, and each were required to practice the melody two hours each day for five days. One group played the melody on the piano keys while the other group simply imagined playing the melody. Both groups were scanned again during and after playing or imagining the melody. Both groups registered identical brain changes. Physically playing the piano or imagining it restructured the brain in the same way after only five days.
Before they are licensed, London taxi drivers must study for up to two years to acquire “The Knowledge” of London’s thousands of roads. MRIs of those who acquire “The Knowledge” show greater volume in the right posterior hippocampus — devoted to spatial navigation memory — when compared to a control group. The researchers noted that changes in the hippocampal gray matter demonstrated:
local plasticity in the structure of a healthy adult human brain as a function of increasing exposure to an environmental stimulus.
Thus, the more the cabbies used their spatial navigation memory, the larger the posterior hippocampus became.
In another example, a German study measured the effects of juggling on the brain. Twelve people learned to juggle while another 12 — the control group — had to refrain from learning to juggle. All 24 underwent MRI scans to establish a baseline for comparison. Then, the juggling 12 were given 3 months to learn to juggle, which was defined as sustaining a three-ball cascade for at least 60 seconds. At the end of three months, all 24— jugglers and non-jugglers — were given a second MRI scan. While there was no change in the non-jugglers, the jugglers had a significant expansion of gray matter in the mid-temporal area and the left intra-parietal sulcus. As reported in the study: “learning-induced cortical plasticity is also reflected at a structural level.”
But the structural change was not permanent; the process of pruning and shifting in the brain continued. After learning the skill, the new jugglers stopped juggling. (Perhaps because juggling did not increase their opportunities to contribute to the gene pool?) They then were given a third brain scan: their expanded grey matter — now unused — had returned to normal size.
In short, learning and practicing a new skill increased gray matter in the brain area dedicated to fine motor skills and peripheral vision. The gray matter decreased when practicing ended. Learning, and “not-learning,” and “not using what you’ve learned” all alter the structure of the brain, changing networks, synapses and neurons. The brain operates under a “use it or lose it” policy.
This is the alarm that no one considers: AI replaces neural networks. Unused neurons and their networks are either redirected to another purpose or pruned from the brain. The brain also deletes synapses, dendrites, and neurons, rendered unnecessary by AI. As AI technology replaces student thinking, we are “dumbing down the country.” This is American atrophy, with all the fluff and flutter of the Moulin Rouge.
Before artifical intelligence, Mark Twain captured the spirit of the can-can:
The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to.
And, as Cole Porter wrote in his 1953 musical:
Takes no art to do a can-can,
It is so simple to do,
When you start to do a can-can,
'Twill be so easy for you.
Welcome to the can-can phase of AI: it can be so easy for you.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Learning and Teaching Creativity: You Can Only Imagine, is available at https://itascabooks.com/products/learning-and-teaching-creativity-you-can-only-imagine