Automated Classrooms from the 1960s to the present day: is there a future?

We are really pleased to conclude this year's AI Ethics & Society event series with not one, not two, but three distinguished guest speakers tapping into the much debated hot and thorny issue of AI and automation in the classroom, from elementary to higher education. Our three speakers will offer historical perspectives on the social and political foundations of AI/automation in education as well as insights about current and future tropes. The three presentations will be followed by discussion about future directions.

Where: Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square The University of Edinburgh and online via this .

When: Monday 20 July 2026, 15:30-17:00.

Agenda:

• 3x15 minute talk (see details below)
• 45 minutes of panel style Q&A
• Informal self-funded gathering for refreshments afterwards - venue to be announced on the spot for in-person participants

As usual, everyone is welcome!

Rethinking the connection between past and present dreams of the ‘automated classroom’

Abstract: Spanning the postwar economic boom and Cold War anxieties, educational reformers, psychologists, and policymakers embraced what might be called a cybernetic dream: the automation of teaching and learning in school settings, enabling the efficient scaling of education for growing student populations. From programmed instruction to early computer-assisted learning, experimental devices promised objectivity, efficiency, and measurable outcomes. While a substantial body of historically informed research has traced continuities between mid-twentieth-century classroom trials and today’s global AI prototyping, I argue that the history of educational technologies is better understood through its discontinuities: failed experiments, institutional resistance, shifting pedagogical paradigms, and changing societal and economic contexts.

Speaker Bio: is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne, currently working on a project at the intersection of history of technology, media, and international computer data sharing.

Children rewired. Remaking minds and social orders through programming

The idea of AI tutors is not new. The computer was a central protagonist in late 1960s debates about instruction, with AI researchers at MIT or Edinburgh foreseeing its potential to lead an educational revolution that would prepare children for the post-industrial society or the end of authority. In this paper, I study the political visions of engineers, sociologists and teachers involved in research around the programming language Logo, initially developed at MIT as an alternative to computer-assisted instruction programmes. While historians and STS scholars have emphasised Logo’s libertarianism, tracing it to US-centred counterculture imaginaries, I offer a distinct narrative that emphasises Logo’s connection to early Cold War debates about creativity and liberal educational reform, both in the US and internationally. Logo’s original ambition was to create the sociotechnical conditions for the flourishing of liberal autonomy and culture, and its later recastings as libertarian or feminist remained largely controversial, including among its advocates. Political contestation over the meaning of Logo brings attention to the role of psychological and pedagogical struggles in shaping early AI ideas of learning as either spontaneous, adaptive or supervised. It also sheds light on a largely overlooked techno-utopian strand in the history of Cold War liberalism. The engineers and educators involved with Logo departed from dominant positivism and behaviorism, mobilising John Dewey and Jean Piaget against BF Skinner. And in contrast to mid-century critics of technology, they mechanised liberalism’s optimistic vision of human nature, conditioning political emancipation to the crafting of liberal machines.

Speaker bio: is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of contemporary transhumanism in the Anglosphere, ​showing how visions of the posthuman have transformed liberal political concepts and imaginaries since the mid-twentieth century. Her current research explores the political theories and history of computing education in the United States, Britain and France.

School testing: AI prototype trials and the scalable automated classroom

Abstract: Scientific and commercial interests in automating classroom activities have a long history, but the future impact of artificial intelligence on education has only recently become a global policy concern. In England, this impact is being anticipated by the Department for Education through the design of prototypes and pilot tests of AI in real-world classrooms. Delivered with edtech companies and global tech corporations, the AI prototype ‘testbed’ program is intended to model the future shape and functionalities of the ‘automated classroom’. The analysis I present examines (1) proof of concept AI prototyping as pedagogic prefiguration, and (2) pilot testing as promissory evidence production. Such testbed trials centre the idea that schools are to be involved in testing new technologies. Drawing on recent sociological accounts of testing, I argue instead that tech trials test the school itself, making classrooms into sites of sociotechnical experimentation. The result is the production of an ‘evidence base’ supporting commercial and policy claims about AI’s future potential in the education sector, and the design of engineering blueprints for the ‘scalable’ automated classroom.

Speaker Bio: is a senior lecturer and co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, University of Edinburgh, and an editor of Learning, Media and Technology.

Image credit: Ulysse Gerkens & FARI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://betterimagesofai.org/images?artist=UlysseGerkens&title=ServerPool

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