Freida Njeru

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (But We'll Watch It Anyway!) As soon as the bell rings, I draw a breath and press the button on the projector. There is only a second to wonder if they day will be easy or if I will earn my pay today. The screen flickers to life with the start of today's lesson, but after just a second, the slide is replaced with the words, “Teacher watches television!” the class erupts in laughter. In this age of high-speed digital sharing—especially for my students—this is the ultimate burn. Earn my pay it is, I think. That's OK. It's nothing I didn't expect. And there's nothing I can do about it, since I have a strong need for that paycheck. When bio-cybernetic interface (BCI) implants were first developed for children (they had quickly found fully-developed brains would reject the interface), educators' opinions were split. The optimists hailed them as the best educational technology tool since the internet, envisioning grand communities of learners in locations around the globe, achieving all their learning through collaborative, projectbased assignments. Meanwhile, the skeptics pointed out that these devices would be installed in young, still-developing brains. Would BCI learning really lend itself to independent thought and critical thinking, or would it be used to spoon feed just enough knowledge for passing standardized tests? Worse yet, some developmental psychologists warned that, using BCI, children could be conditioned to accept almost anything they downloaded as fact. In other words, under the certain circumstances, these wonderful tools for promoting critical thinking would have the opposite effect: unquestioning automatons instead of team-minded critical thinkers. Within 10 years, 90% of children under 10 had BCIs. Governments everywhere subsidized the implants in the interest of universal education, even as research was bearing out the skeptics warnings from the previous decade. The findings only helped increase their use: no school wanted to have low test scores, and this was the easiest way to achieve that. It also allowed already cost-conscious schools to save on their single largest cost—teachers. With the BCIs, one teacher could teach hundreds of students at a time without them even having to leave their homes. In most cases, students were able to absorb the information so easily and the learning was so simple and rote, that first-generation AIs took the place of human teachers. The exceptions—those who resisted and disrupted the broadcasts—ended up in special schools, taught by specialists. That's where I come in. My job is to get students to stop questioning, stop resisting. In the close proximity of a classroom, in small groups, we are able to condition students to accept their broadcasts unconditionally, to stop disrupting, to be docile learners like all the rest. I hate brainwashing kids for a living, but I don't want to end up in student loan default camp, so what else can I do? I just do my job, silently rooting against my own success. To do that job, I need to determine the troublemakers and beam the information directly into their brains. Direct broadcasts undermine the executive functions in children's brains, effectively making them zombies. In this case, as innocuous and silly as the TV-watching insult is, I can't just let it go without losing credibility, so I first run a quick protocol on my machine to see who sent the message. Of course, the origin light pings around most of the seating chart, giving an inconclusive answer Ugh, I was afraid that would happen. Yeah. Earning my pay, alright. Now, as often is the case, I find myself thinking like a devious 12-year-old. My eye zeroes in on one name the program didn't point to surrounded by those it did. Almost too obvious. I send the signal to Jimmy with the full load of information and settle in to teach the lesson. The more I can broadcast normally, the more effective the lesson will be. As I start to move on from Jimmy, I notice something else on the screen: “Teacher still has a cell phone!!” More laughter issues from the students. This time, Jimmmy is pinged, but Elias is not. I shoot him with a heavy stream of information and move on. A little further into the lesson, I notice several students not paying attention. Somehow, they have figured out how to communicate with each other even when there is a lesson broadcast in progress. I nip it in the bud by temporarilyshutting down their peripheral communication abilities. I am just resuming my broadcast when I hear a loud, shrill alarm seamingly coming from under my desk. I locate a button on my machine to turn it off, but right away another alarm goes off in the back of the room. Before I can turn this one off, someone yells, “fire alarm!” and they all stand up and head for the door. By the time I manage to get the alarm turned off and herd them their seats, the lesson period is almost up. That's it: no more Ms. Nice-Teacher. I hit the omnibus feature on my machine's interface to stream data into each student at once, effectively zombifying all of them at once. I do this long enough, and none of them should be a problem for today. They might stagger around the school the rest of the day and have some short-term memory loss, but they should definitely be well behaved for the foreseeable future. The bell rings and they file out sluggishly, as I predicted. Although I feel like I kept control (barely), I also feel bad for having to use the omnibus. Not only is it not good for the kids, it just drives home to me the wrongness of not letting kids think for themselves. My pity-party stops in its tracks, though when I look at the screen. Somehow it had lit up as the students staggered out. Clear as day, in 30-point red lettering, the screen reads: “Our teacher watches television!!!”