Education Links, 5/19/2026
Kathleen deLaski on skills employers desire; Maya Sulkin on Alpha school; Brent McCord on the new class divide; Steve Stewart-Williams on left-wing dominance
Google just announced last week that they will pilot a hiring process where software engineer candidates can bring their Ai bots to job interviews. This is a clear acknowledgement that, in some fields already, you will be measured on how you perform as a conductor of an Ai-rich orchestra, not just as a single instrument, in this case, your own brain. It’s lot of pressure to have to manage other brains, however synthetic, in real time. The new job title emerging is called “agent manager.”
Most employers are perplexed about what skills to look for these days. In terms of AI, for now de Laski reports that they seem to want smart prompt engineering, editing AI writing, multimedia creation with AI, using AI to brainstorm, mitigating ethical and security risks, and process improvement.
Price said Alpha students spend less time on screens than kids at most traditional schools—the average student spends 98 minutes per day on school-issued devices during school hours alone, not counting homework, personal devices, or after-school use. Notably, every Alpha parent I spoke to described themselves as anti–screen time. Several had taken the Wait Until 8th pledge, a parent-led movement designed to delay giving smartphones to kids until the 8th grade. Julia and her husband, Steve, ban certain Disney shows because the animation is too stimulating, and they’re big fans of Jonathan Haidt, the Free Press contributor and leading proponent of smartphone bans in schools. “There’s good cognitive food and there’s bad cognitive food,” Julia told me. “We don’t seem to make that comparison.”
It’s a long, fascinating article. Sulkin writes,
The question is whether the gamified system can produce not only a person who loves school, but a person who loves learning. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who wrote The Digital Delusion, told me that while gamification works for keeping kids excited, it doesn’t work for retaining information.
Horvath comes across as really dug in against Alpha School. I like the concept, but I’m waiting for the randomized controlled trial.
On the difference between “AI for good” and “AI for bad,” Brendan McCord writes
Two children are looking at screens.
One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.
It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.
He calls this the divide between being an author and being a character. UATX students are authors. Alpha students are authors. I am sure that a lot that is selection. If you think your child has the personality to be an author rather than a character, then Alpha or UATX is probably a good choice.
Steve Stewart-Williams writes,
not only have conservatives become vanishingly rare, so have centrists. That’s how complete the left’s dominance is: Even moderates are now a fringe group in academia.
…female faculty are more left-leaning than male, and younger faculty more left-leaning than older.
…A non-trivial minority of academics describe themselves as Marxists. And even larger minorities describe themselves as radicals or activists. In other words, extreme views are relatively common in universities - and they’re more common today than they were twenty years ago.
Recall the distinction between institutionalists and brokenists. If you think all it will take is a little bit of reform to fix academia, then you are an institutionalist. Not me.
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In my 1990s college experience, the self-described Marxist professors were the worst of the worst. Like little peacocks strutting to and fro in the auditorium spreading the gospel of Marx and Engels while completely ignoring the syllabus or divergent points of view. What a disservice to humanity. As a subtle middle finger, I sent them all bereavement cards upon the passing of Pol Pot in 1998.
I'm not convinced that comparison of two children with tablets is valid. I get bored just watching videos or TV, and I did to a lesser extent when I was a kid. We got an encyclopedia when I was 10 more or less, and I started reading with the first volume. Some of the topics I remember lead me to think I stopped just reading about halfway through A and began to treat it more like a web page, following references and learning to weed out fluff like the 7th Earl of Winchestershire.
I know enough other people like that to not believe most children would just vegetate watching cat videos. I believe most would eventually learn how to do things with the tablet, like learn on their own. A tutor of some sort would speed up the process.
I've written before of being kicked out of college because I was learning more on my own from the library and an antique computer than the classes, and stopped going to classes. Lecture halls for required subjects, whose students forget everything after the tests are over, are not superior to cat videos. At least the cat video watcher can find other uses for tablets without getting kicked out of college :-)