Primary AI Policy - The Great Pretender

AI is not going to augment human capability in Australian primary schools.

It is going to replace large parts of it, the same way every general-purpose technology before it has done.

New technology doesn’t tend to augment traditions. It reforms and replaces.

The car did not enhance walking.

The pocket calculator did not enhance arithmetic.

Email did not enhance the handwritten letter.

Pretending otherwise is the central error of every Australian education policy document written about AI so far.

The Castlereagh Statement, like most policy documents on AI in education, keeps insisting that AI will augment rather than replace.

A growing body of academic work argues that AI is not a tool at all but an epistemic technology, the kind that reshapes what counts as knowledge and how it gets made.

Primary schools are not being asked to integrate a new instrument so much as redesign the system around a fundamentally different relationship between humans and knowledge.

The paper is at www.primarai.com.au/theprimaraischool.

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