Why MAGA fears human teachers

[marmar]

Why MAGA fears human teachers
Melania Trump’s robot stunt opens a new front in the GOP's war on education

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published March 30, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) One thing Donald Trump‘s White House knows how to do is put on a spectacle so unsettling it is sure to grab attention. So it was last week when Melania Trump walked the red-carpeted hallway, dressed all in an all-white suit — accompanied by a white humanoid robot. The image, reminiscent of a wedding, quickly went viral, driven by jokes about how the First Lady had finally met someone with her own emotional caliber and how Figure 03, as it is called, was a step up from her husband. But as odd as the images were, what Melania Trump was selling was even worse: a GOP proposal to replace human teachers with robots.

“Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,'” she told attendees. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history.”

Welcome to the latest front in the Republican war on schools.

For decades, the GOP has been leading an assault on public education. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gripe was “stick to reading, writing and ‘rithmetic,” which implies hostility toward expanding those lessons to more complex ideas like literary analysis, critical thinking, and higher math and sciences. This talking point, which implies that no one needs more than a fifth grade education, fell out of favor as more kids began going to college. The shape of the complaints may have shifted. But conservatives have clung to arguments about providing students with a “classical education,” which essentially means not teaching anything that wouldn’t have been found in a 19th-century classroom. They have pushed “school choice,” which has the end goal of funneling money out of public schools and into religious schools run by fundamentalist Christians. They have also championed homeschooling. Most recently, we saw the rise of Moms for Liberty, a group whose name hides its real aim: to redefine censorship as “parents’ rights” with the goal of removing books that portray people of color, women and LGBTQ people as deserving of full rights and dignity.

....(snip)....

Donald Trump’s executive order to promote AI in schools argued that the tech “sparks curiosity and creativity” and “will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills.” A recent Brookings Institute report, though, showed the opposite: that kids who use a lot of AI “are not thinking for themselves,” as Rebecca Winthrop, one of the study’s authors, told NPR. “They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.”

This is bad for kids. But for MAGA, an authoritarian movement that depends on people struggling to understand others’ points of view, it has an undeniable appeal. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/30/why-maga-fears-human-teachers/

[cbabe]

1. Union busting.

[chouchou]

2. "Mr. Preston and Mrs. Preston.." "Johnnie was troublesome today again at class."

"Johnnie tried to disconnect my circuits again"
"Johnnie will not be coming home today...ever"