The Wizard of AI: What Postman Knew All Along

“Educators should always maintain an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.” 

In 1985, Neil Postman warned that television would not make us wiser, only more amused. Forty years later, schools glow with screens and dashboards, while leaders chant the praises of artificial intelligence. Postman was right.

Of course, Postman was never really writing about television or computers. He was writing about education, and about our failure to understand what education is for. He saw that when a society mistakes information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom, it will end up with none of them. And he feared that schools, in their eagerness to chase every new gadget, would lead that decline.

He was not alone. Russell Kirk, speaking in 1983, mocked the parade of audio-visual contraptions thrust into classrooms during the 1950s and 1960s, most of them destined to gather dust in cupboards once the novelty wore off. “One of the grave faults of American schooling,” he said, “is the eagerness to embrace the newest gadget at the expense of the tested tools of learning.” He might just as well have been describing England in 2025.

What Postman and Kirk both saw clearly was this: education is not merely an exchange of information. The valuable part of education lies not in how much data you can pour into a child, but in what you help them do with it. How you filter it, organise it, and connect it into a coherent whole. It is through this process that a child is acculturated into humanity’s great inheritance of ideas. Strip that away, and education becomes just another transaction in a technopoly.

The Faustian Bargain

Postman liked to say that every technology is a Faustian bargain. It gives, but it also takes away. Computers bring speed and access, but they also displace patience, dialogue, and memory. Tablets put an infinity of material at our fingertips, but they also reduce learning to the endless scroll of distraction. The bargain is always there, yet in schools we almost never ask whether the price is worth paying.

Postman urged educators to approach technology with scepticism: never natural, never inevitable, always in need of scrutiny.

That message has been lost. Today, too many school leaders treat “digital strategy” as a badge of modernity and proof of progress. Few pause to ask whether the software actually helps a child think more deeply about Shakespeare, or number, or science.

I was reminded of this recently, when being encouraged towards the benefits of technology and innovation. Of course, there are benefits. But Postman’s wisdom still holds: all technologies come with a point of view. Today, in our rush to swallow the AI Kool Aid, many MATs are forgetting that.

MATs and schools up and down the country are buzzing with talk of AI with an uncritical acceptance that it is the future. And yet most leaders in education have little idea of what AI actually is. They talk about it in the same tones as those who believed the Wizard of Oz was real – awed by the glowing curtain, convinced they are witnessing the birth of a new intelligence. But those of us who understand the mathematics are less dazzled. Behind the curtain is not a godlike mind, but clever machinery – still astonishing in its way, but nowhere close to the artificial general intelligence (AGI) society seems to think already exists. We are a very long way from that. To mistake today’s tools for an AGI is naïve at best, dangerous at worst.

The Agenda Nobody Wants to Name

What almost nobody in education seems willing to admit is that the real agenda of much educational technology – especially generative AI – is to remove the need for teachers altogether. Imagine the savings for government if schools no longer required expert professionals, just software and supervisors. And the same logic applies to parenting: we already see the rise of digital “coaches,” “therapists,” and “personal organisers.” To pretend that private equity firms, who pour money into these ventures, are not talking openly about this is naïve. I have been in those meetings. Of course they are.

Postman argued that every subject must be taught historically. To teach biology without Democritus, or politics without Aristotle, is to rob children of the story of how ideas came to be. Education, in Postman’s view, was always about joining the Great Conversation – hearing the voices of those who came before us, testing their ideas, and adding our own. That conversation is precisely what is flattened when learning is treated as little more than informational access.

And Postman wanted technology itself to be studied. Not how to use it – that is always fleeting – but how it uses us. What does it do to our memory, our attention, our relationships, our sense of self? These are the questions children need to ask, if they are to resist becoming mere consumers of whatever screen is placed before them.

Finally, Postman emphasised the role of language. He called it “languaging” – the art of questioning, speaking, listening, and writing in every subject. Where these arts wither, so too does thinking. A society that cannot speak or write with precision cannot think with precision either. Schools that neglect this in favour of teaching children how to “use technology” have, frankly, got it backwards.

The Education We Need

Postman’s solution was not more screens, but fewer. Education, he believed, is rooted in fundamentals: dialogue, stories, texts that endure, relationships between teachers and pupils, continuity with the past. I happen to think he was right.

Education is not improved by novelty or by speed. It is improved when we teach children as though they are heirs to the achievements of humanity. That means acculturating them into the great disciplines – mathematics, literature, science, art, music – not as collections of data points, but as narratives that show them who they are, where they have come from, and what they might yet become.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman contrasted two dystopias. Orwell feared a world in which truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared one in which truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance. Postman knew Huxley was right.

And if you walk through too many schools today – where devices glow, but history is thin, and belonging is absent – you will see that he was. Children are surrounded by information but starved of meaning. They are given access to everything but connected to nothing.

Postman showed us a way out. It is the same way educators have always known, when they are brave enough to resist the gadgets and the gimmicks: to teach with scepticism about technology, with reverence for history, with seriousness about language, and with a determination to preserve the Great Conversation for the next generation.

If we forget that, then the wizard will keep dazzling us, while the real work of education slips quietly away.

Neil Postman knew the wizard was only ever an illusion. The question is whether we have the courage to look behind the curtain.