I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught one year by a nun who had an old, empty bottle of Top Job filled with holy water which she would throw on us when we collectively misbehaved, trying, I suppose, to chase away the devil. Good fucking luck with that. By those modest standards, a version of the classroom of the future which is to be led by algorithms, as detailed in an NPR story by William Huntsberry, doesn’t sound half bad. An excerpt:

“The classroom of the future probably won’t be led by a robot with arms and legs, but it may be guided by a digital brain.

It may look like this: one room, about the size of a basketball court; more than 100 students, all plugged into a laptop; and 15 teachers and teaching assistants.

This isn’t just the future, it’s the sixth grade math class at David Boody Jr. High School in Brooklyn, near Coney Island. Beneath all the human buzz, something other than humans is running the show: algorithms.

The kind of complex computer calculations that drive our Google searches or select what we see on our Facebook pages.

Algorithms choose which students sit together. Algorithms measure what the children know and how well they know it. They choose what problems the children should work on and provide teachers with the next lesson to teach.

This combination of human capital and technology is called ‘blended learning.”•