I had a mentor teacher who was fairly unethical, and once said to me,
“Horne, if you start getting complaints, give ’em all A’s. Those complaints will dry up.”
It was meant as a joke (I think), but like most bad jokes, it carried too much truth. The idea was simple: avoid scrutiny by keeping everyone happy even if it meant compromising the core purpose of education: teaching and learning.
That memory has been on my mind lately as I think about the role of AI in schools.
What happens when a teacher uses AI to design the lesson… AI to generate the assessment… students use AI to complete it… and the teacher uses AI to grade it… and everyone makes an A?
Nobody complains.
But nobody learns.
And everyone quietly agrees not to say the obvious part out loud: This isn’t real.
That’s my greatest concern—not that AI will destroy education, but that it will dull it. That we’ll settle for the illusion of learning because it’s easier, faster, quieter. That we’ll stop asking, “Did they grow?” and start asking, “Did it look good?”
We could end up with a system where everyone is satisfied—teachers, students, parents, even administrators—and yet nothing of substance is happening. It looks like learning, but it’s just going through the motions.
That’s the invisible handshake.