Schools are catching onto tech’s playbook

For years, big tech companies have embedded their products into the classroom whether through Google's Chromebooks or computer science curricula developed by Apple or Microsoft. The industry pushed a generation of kids to foster coding skills with the promise of high-paying jobs. Now, those students are finding themselves less in demand as AI takes over, and the industry seems to be repeating its playbook. Senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner talks to Natasha Singer, author of the new book "Coding Kids," about how big tech worked its way into the classroom, and why Natasha is optimistic about educators’ response to the AI push. Further reading: Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook Worried Anthropic researchers warn that AI ‘could kill all humans’ Meta’s Muse AI works and creeps me out Another big James Talarico interview is punted to YouTube due to FCC threats Apple asks: have you ever imagined iOS devices doin’ it? ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[email protected]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of deep lobbying. I'm Lauren Feiner, The Verge's senior policy reporter. Code.org was the splashy nonprofit that led a massive celebrity-laden campaign in the 2010s for kids across the US to learn computer science and gain skills they needed for the workforce. But at the same time, there was a modest group of academics seeking to introduce a new type of computer science course into schools. They had a goal of expanding the kinds of students who entered the field. In a new book, Coding Kids, New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer charts the path of both of these efforts and explains how a tech industry-created computer science curriculum became commonplace in many schools, and what that means now that

• 0:44Speaker 00

  those same companies are laying off engineers and prioritizing different skills in the AI era. I wanted to hear more from Natasha about what she's observed over the years covering tech's immersion into public schools, and whether school districts are prepared for industry efforts to replicate the success for AI. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I'm senior reviews editor Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 10, 2026. An Anthropic researcher quit, saying the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, but are recklessly pursuing development anyway. A current Anthropic employee agreed and said there was a greater than 10% chance of that happening. Notably, there was no mention of a plan to stop that. A couple of weeks ago, I would have said this is the same tired, "Oh, no, our AI is too powerful. Please give us more money" playbook. But that was a couple autonomous hacking storms ago. Speaking of AI, reporter Emma Roth tried Meta's new Muse AI agent, which launched yesterday. Meta says it can take the busy work off your plate by helping with your emails, planning your trips, doing your shopping, and more. Emma says it's creepy.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Mark Zuckerberg says you can trust Muse. Yes, trust Muse. Muse is your friend. You don't need to do your own emails. Muse can do them. Jimmy Kimmel's interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for US Senate, will not air on television, thanks to threats from the FCC. Brendan Carr is such a dummy. And finally, Apple posted a TikTok implying an iPhone and an iPad Mini were about to do it. We saw it, and you have to see it, too. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, September 10, 2026.

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• 3:25Speaker 00

  All right, Natasha Singer, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me, Lauren.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  So I want to start back in the early 1910s, because this push that you described to use tech to improve education is really nothing new. And you write about how even Thomas Edison had some ideas about how technology would revolutionize education. Can you tell me a little bit about what his idea was there?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  So I found these articles in The New York Times from like 1912, and Thomas Edison had invented this thing that showed moving pictures, right? And it was a projector, and he just thought, "This should be in every school, because books are boring, and they're like rote, and teachers teach them in boring ways, and my machine will be super engaging, and we should just throw out all the books and put these projectors in every classroom, and we'll show films about people and news and animals, and kids will be riveted, and they'll want to come to school." And what I found fascinating about that is, for the next, you know, more than a century,

• 4:38Speaker 04

  these prominent tech innovators have been making similar arguments. You just have to change the product that they're pushing. And like, it's so interesting to me that like, we have this tradition in the United States of these like charismatic, powerful innovators who believe the thing they made is going to transform education for the better. And then we see that, you know, decades later with Steve Jobs. Apple is a new company, it's the early 1980s, they've invented these very compelling desktop computers, and Steve Jobs is like, "We got to get one in every school, because it's going to transform education, it's going to democratize learning, it's going to make kids creative," right? And then decades later, we have Google, like, "We've invented the Chromebook, and it's cheap, and it's sturdy, and it's going to democratize access to education and give kids really great career skills." And now we have AI, right?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  And if we just give every kid their own chatbot, it's going to democratize learning and customize learning and teach kids these important career skills. And so it's remarkable that we have these cycles of tech in schools, and we have these brilliant innovators, I would say the vast majority of them men, who think that their products can transform learning. And they are hopeful, and they are well-meaning, but it's also their business imperatives, right? Edison wanted to sell more projectors, right? Apple, you know, wants to sell more iPads to schools. Google and Microsoft want more schools to use their AI products. So it's like this combination of good intentions, but also there's a business motive underneath.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. So I wanted to dive in a little bit into what we actually know about whether adding all this technology into schools actually helps. Does it actually improve the learning process? And you write a little bit about this in your book. So can you share a little bit about what we actually know about whether this actually helps learning?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  So there was a study in Peru, there was a program called One Laptop Per Child, where nonprofit groups and tech companies tried to get one laptop per child in countries around the world. And so countries like Peru and Uruguay tried this. And in the Peru study, it involved more than 500 rural schools, looking at, if you give every kid a laptop, what happens over a decade. And they found that it did not improve learning outcomes. It definitely increased the use of computers by students, and it improved their using computer skills. But it did not affect educational outcomes, and Uruguay found something similar. And so you could say, okay, that's like Uruguay, or that's Peru, but like, maybe

• 7:13Speaker 04

  that doesn't have worldwide implications. But I was talking to UNESCO, and they pointed to a report they put out a few years ago in which UNESCO, which is, you know, the United Nations Education Agency, said that there was little rigorous evidence that digital technology improves educational outcomes. And more than that, they said, there are very few studies that are rigorous about educational technology, and that most of those studies are funded or done by the companies wanting to sell their tools to schools. And there was also a line in the UNESCO report that was talking about, you know, when teachers adopt new tech, a lot of the time, they're not asking, "Show me a rigorous study that this thing will improve educational outcomes."

• 7:57Speaker 00

  That's really fascinating. Yeah, so with that kind of context in place, I wanted to kind of go back to the creation of code.org. And, you know, it's the Obama era, tech CEOs are basically celebrities, and you talk about a former Microsoft executive named Hadi Partovi, who comes up with this idea to launch a movement around getting kids to learn code with a viral YouTube video.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  And none of us know how to read and write code.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  Man, I don't care. I think it's cool, and, you know, I'm learning a lot. Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  In that clip, you hear from the Black Eyed Peas' Will I Am, you hear from NBA star Chris Bosh, and then you hear from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. This video just blows up. But Partovi didn't really have a plan of what to do after he stoked all of this enthusiasm. So can you talk about what his approach was like to this problem, the tech industry had identified as a lack of coding talent, and how that was informed by VC and startup norms?

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Hadi Partovi had worked at Microsoft. He'd also started startups, and he was an early investor in things that were startups at the time, like Facebook and Uber. And so what Hadi did, and like, he's a brilliant, charming, charismatic person, who is an unbelievable strategist. And he used the strategies that like you normally use in startups, like audience generation and viral marketing, but he applied it to education, and I haven't seen anybody do it at that scale. So as you point out, he starts, he launches this group, code.org, with his twin brother, and they make this video on YouTube, and it goes viral, and it has all these tech celebrities.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  And then it generates all this enthusiasm, because suddenly, parents and teachers and kids are going, "Wow, like, this is fun. Look at all these billionaires who started these companies. Maybe I could be the next Steve Jobs, or I could be the next Bill Gates." It becomes a phenomenon, and code.org really makes coding a household word in the United States. But then, having sort of ginned up all this enthusiasm, the task is, how do we make this actually scale in schools? How do we get computer science into schools? And here, I have to say, a lot of researchers and education groups and others had been working to get computer science in schools for decades, and there were programs across the country trying to do this.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  But they didn't operate on this scale of code.org, but also, they didn't have this startup-y view about how you could change education. They had a view that like, you put something in a school, you study it, if it improves outcomes, you put it in another school. It was like traditional education research. And you want that, you want to have the outcomes. But Hadi's, you know, an entrepreneur, and so like, let's build it first. And so he came up with the idea for this thing, Hour of Code.

• 10:58Speaker 07

  We want to get 10 million students to do the Hour of Code.

• 11:01Speaker 08

  Hour of Code. Hour of Code.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  The Hour of Code.

• 11:04Speaker 08

  Hour of Code. Hour of Code. Hour of Code. The Hour of Code.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  He wanted to get millions of kids across the world in their schools to all code at the same time. And his argument was, if we just get kids coding for an hour, using lessons that are fun and engaging, then it will demystify coding and it won't seem so scary if you're somebody who's like, not a hacker stereotype, right? Because at the time, you know, with the Facebook movie and other things, like the stereotype of a computer scientist was like Mark Zuckerberg. And so if you were a girl, or a kid from a low-income family, or, you know, black and brown students, right? You didn't see yourself in computing. And so he starts the Hour of Code and he launches it in December. There's something called Computer Science Education Week. It was 2013.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  And he got buy-in from Microsoft and Google and Apple. Many of the companies like held Hour of Code tutorials in their stores. Schools across the world held these events. And it became like a coding holiday. And I don't know if you've ever been to a school where there's an Hour of Code, but there, like, I did a lot of Hour of Codes for this book, right? And it's infectious, like, you do a little thing and then it works and you just want to do another little thing, like you can like, code a droid to go through a maze, or you can code Ilsa, the princess from Frozen, to skate around the ice. But like, one of the most popular ones is this Hour of Code called Dance Party. And you're, you can make your own like animated music video. And what you see if you go to classes where this is happening, is like, kids get out

• 12:38Speaker 04

  of their seats and they're dancing around to the videos they made, and then they want to make another one. And so, um, this is kind of a startup technique to like, grow your audience and get them fascinated. And at the same time, you know, the second viral thing that code.org did, then they developed, at the same time, lessons for schools. So you could have a semester or a year-long computer science program. And they trained teachers. And they went from state to state advocating for states to pass laws to fund computer science, train computer science teachers, require schools to teach computer science. And they also got about a dozen states to pass laws requiring computer science as a graduation rate.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  So, um, code.org, backed by Google and Microsoft, really made computer science one of the most desirable subjects at the time in public schools.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  It's really interesting here because in your book, we see that at the same time, there was kind of this competing effort that was led by academics and, you know, this very methodical approach to getting more kids to take computer science in schools. So can you describe what the researchers you wrote about, who were trying to come up with the idea for AP Computer Science Principles? What they were trying to do and how their approach differed from code.orgs?

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yes. There was an amazing researcher at the University of UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, named Jane Margolis, who is one of the central characters in the book. And she and others had this idea that like, there are a lot of kids who don't have computers at home, or maybe never coded before, and don't even see themselves in this industry. And we need to have a broader-based course that is not centered on programming, to get them interested in this and show them they can do this. And so they developed a course called Exploring Computer Science, which was a broad-based course that taught kids like, how does the internet work? What is a computer? Is your phone a computer? That taught them a little bit of data science, that asked them to think about the consequences

• 14:45Speaker 04

  of tech for society. And then also taught them how to code. But it was like, you need context to understand the power of tech, and the power of these companies, and the power of computer science, to get kids who've never coded before into it. And so then, you asked about AP Computer Science. There was a program officer at the National Science Foundation, and her name is Jan Cooney. And her job was at the college level to broaden the participation of students in computer science, because it was a field dominated by white and Asian men. And she, you know, her job was to get more women into computer science, more African-American students, more students with disabilities, more low-income students, more Latino students, into computer science. And she realized that the problem was not at the university level.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  It was happening much earlier in high schools and middle schools. And she had seen what the researchers were doing at UCLA and developed and funded, you know, this Exploring Computer Science course. And she's like, we need this at the high school level. We need a new AP course that will get high school students introduced to computer science. And at the time, you know, there was a decade-old computer science course called AP Computer Science A. And it was just pure programming, right? It's like, you take Russian, and you learn Russian language and Russian syntax, but like, you're not going to read the great Russian novels, right? You're not going to learn Russian history. You're just going to learn like, you know, is the Cyrillic character in the right place?

• 16:09Speaker 04

  And so that AP course, you know, the programming course, uh, was very non-diverse. Like, the majority of the students were boys. And, you know, it was very narrowly attuned to, we're going to teach these high schoolers to program and then they'll major it in college. So Jane Cooney goes to the College Board, which runs the AP program, which as you know, is like, basically one of the few national programs that sets standards for high school courses. Getting a new AP course, you know, is a huge thing. The College Board doesn't launch new courses very often. But Trevor Packer, who was head of the AP program, felt like, yeah, the AP Computer Science course we teach now is, what he said, horrifically non-diverse. We need to try something new.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  And so he greenlights an effort to create this new course, and Jan Cooney at the National Science Foundation funds it. And it's much more broad-based and it's designed to be an on-ramp. And they launched it, you know, and hundreds of thousands of kids have taken it now. And it is a much broader approach to computer science than the standard programming class.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Where have these two things ended up? Like, how has the success of the AP Computer Science Principles and Exploring Computer Science curricula gone compared to the success and, you know, scale of code.org?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  Code.org became one of the largest providers of AP Computer Science Principles curriculum. And one of the efforts, you know, from code.org, from the National Science Foundation, from the Exploring Computer Science group, from everybody, was, there actually aren't enough people who can teach computer science, right? Because it's a specialized area. Like, you don't suddenly start teaching physics if you don't know physics. Well, what code.org did was, it created these packaged curriculums. So even if you'd never taught it before, if you were a math teacher, or a biology teacher, or even like, a school technology specialist, you would be able to teach this course. And many teachers I talked to decided to teach the code.org course.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  One of the most unusual things, though, about this AP course was, the College Board approved a number of curriculum providers to provide these box curriculums to teachers. It doesn't do that in any other subject, right? In other courses like English or biology, the College Board has standards and tells teachers what they need to teach kids to take the exam, and then the teachers develop the curriculum. But because, you know, they wanted to grow computer science, they approved box curriculum and including, you know, approving the university, uh, courses that have been developed for AP Computer Science and the code.org course, the College Board began approving box curriculums

• 18:55Speaker 04

  from tech companies, like Microsoft and Apple. So there's an Apple AP Computer Science course that teaches kids to program in Swift, which is Apple's programming language. And another one from Microsoft, which is like, Learn to Code Using Microsoft's Minecraft for Education. And what's striking about this is, um, you know, like, you can imagine that parents would not want, say, Pfizer AP Biology, right? Or Northrop Grumman AP Physics, right? Or ExxonMobil Environmental Science AP. So it's striking that like, the College Board approved the Apple course and Microsoft courses for AP, something it doesn't know other subject.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. And why do you think it did do that? You know, was it just that these were seen as more benevolent actors at the time? Or what was different from other industries where maybe the college board would have said, no way?

• 19:53Speaker 04

  So I talked to the college board about this. And Trevor Packer said, "We wanted to grow this course and we vetted all these curriculums, and they're all rigorous. And we didn't distinguish between a university that developed a curriculum for AP Computer Science Principles and a tech company. We looked at the rigor of the course. And it's democratizing, the college board argues, because if you're a well-resourced suburban high school in which every kid has a MacBook, the Apple AP course might be perfect for you because your kids are using Apple devices. And so the college board said it was a choice.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  You know, I think there is, though, a way you might be able to read this story of code.org and the tech company's development of this curricula versus the curricula developed by academics as kind of a way that bureaucracy and academia maybe moves too slowly. And the way that tech is structured to move quickly and disrupt may actually, you know, kind of bring these skills to students more quickly and prepare them in time for the challenges of the modern day. So I'm curious how you think about that way of reading the situation and, you know, if there's kind of context missing from that sort of interpretation.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  You know, I talked to tech industry executives and interviewed them for my book. And their argument was, "Schools need to teach modern subjects like computer science and AI literacy, and many of them are not equipped to do so. And we came in and we provided tools and teacher training and we sponsored curriculums and we developed our own curriculums to help schools teach kids the skills they need today." And I think that that's a really important argument. It's just that that is the same argument the pharmaceutical industry makes, which is, "We need to teach doctors how to use the latest pills because, you know, we need healthcare to be up to date. And of course, we want doctors to know how to prescribe the latest drugs and use the latest medical devices.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  But what we see is that medicine actually studies the impact of Big Pharma on medical education and the healthcare industry. And it often warps what doctors prescribe, like they prescribe much more of the medicines that the industry is marketing to them and teaching them to use. And also, it affects how doctors think about different diseases, you know, what things they prioritize. And so the point of my book is not to say that what the tech industry doing is doing in schools is bad. It's to say, "We're not actually asking questions about this, even the like obvious questions about what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks that medical researchers ask about how Big Pharma is influencing medicine."

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Like, when you ask these questions, like, what is beneficial about a big tech curriculum? And what might be left out or glossed over? Or what context is missing? Or are we diminishing kids' critical thinking because the curriculums are designed to make them really enthusiastic about tech and be docile consumers and docile employees? Like, when you ask those questions, you're perceived as a critic in tech? But when you ask them in medicine, you're perceived as like a normal person asking normal questions. And so one of the points of the book is just to say, like, "We ought to be asking more questions about this."

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• 26:14Speaker 00

  One really interesting aspect of your book is just the way it kind of describes the role of money and influence in not just politics, but education, you know, something that, you know, all families have to deal with. And, you know, can you describe the term "deep lobbying" that you mention in the book? And also, you know, I wanted to understand more, like, how much does it matter that some of what the tech industry was doing here was not like behind the scenes? It was out in the open. They were, you know, this was the Apple course. This is the Amazon course. You know, what, did that matter?

• 26:51Speaker 04

  One of the things that tech companies did is they funded nonprofit groups to promote tech education, like computer science. They're now doing it to promote AI literacy, but also groups like the PTA. And so, you know, we saw recently in the big trial of attorneys general against Meta, some of the documents that came out. And some of them show like Meta giving money to the PTA to promote social media safety, right? And so it's a way, you know, of brand washing, of like making your brand look better and safer and allaying parents' concerns in some ways.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  And, you know, I know a lot of parents are concerned about this right now. So in my book, I go back to a journalist whose name is William Greider, who looked at lobbying. And he looked at how big companies, you know, oil companies, tobacco companies funded environmental groups or health groups or other things, or Big Pharma funded patient groups to try to get their messages out from groups that were trusted. Because you might not trust, you know, big tobacco saying, "Oh, cigarettes are safe." But if you get some health group to say it, then the public and legislators are more likely to believe it. And so he called this "deep lobbying" because it was lobbying laundered through nonprofit groups.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  And I use that to talk about some of the ways that the tech industry funds nonprofit groups to promote tech in schools and to promote tech education. And again, I don't think it's like big tobacco funding health groups, but I think it's worth following the money and asking questions. And what's so interesting now, you know, we're seeing this unprecedented backlash against tech by parents groups across the country. And some of them have set up a site that they call Screenwashing. And it's a map of large groups that promote tech in schools, including, there's one called ISTI, the International Society for Tech and Education, and other groups. And they just list all the tech companies that fund them.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  And parents feel like, if you are a nonprofit group promoting tech in schools, that you should, every time you're interviewed, disclose who your funders are so that people can understand, you know, you may have good intentions, but you're being funded by tech companies to promote tech in schools.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it struck me, reading the book, that it seems like a lot of these technologists, from Thomas Edison to the present day with AI, seem to have this sense that efficiency should be a goal in education and that, you know, if only we could make this, you know, learning process more efficient, that might be better. I'm curious if that's how your sense of how technologists seem to read the situation and whether efficiency should really be a goal in education.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Some of the gods of tech industry hierarchy are scale, speed, and efficiency. So if you think about the way AI is being marketed, it's like, teachers will be much more efficient because they can use AI to create their lesson plans and lessons for students and generate quizzes and send emails to parents, and it will free them up to spend more time with students, right? Or it'll be much more efficient for students to use AI to make flashcards than to make them themselves. And then kids will just be able to study. But the problem is that, like, if we take the flashcard example, it may be faster and more efficient. But education, like, learning gains often come from, like,

• 30:34Speaker 04

  friction, from productive struggle. And it may be that the way students learn is by thinking about, what flashcards should I make? What should I put on them? What are the answers? And the thing that may help them learn may not be the product, which is the flashcards. And so the tech industry is skipping over the whole process part that actually may be where the learning happens, in the name of efficiency. And so that's just like a tiny example, right? But on the large scale, this whole push for tech in schools and the growing influence of tech companies on the classroom raises this big question, which you're alluding to, which is, what is actually the purpose of public schooling? What do we want kids to learn? And like, do we want them to just learn the skills that the most powerful industry of the day wants kids to learn?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Because like, I think AI is going to transform everything. And we both know that the majority of high school students are already using AI. So of course, we want schools to teach kids about AI and how it works and where it comes from and who profits from it. And also, like, ways that they could benefit from using it and ways that it may be problematic. So I'm not arguing against tech education or tech in schools. But what I am saying is, most parents want more than just getting kids to learn to use tech. They want kids to learn how to be informed citizens in a democracy. And they want kids to figure out what their passions are and who they are and what their beliefs are. And they want kids to learn how to ask deep, critical questions. And so if we let the tech industry

• 32:01Speaker 04

  dictate or even heavily influence what happens in schools, then the question we're asking is, how can we get AI into schools faster? Which is a product question. And not, what are the most important things we want kids to learn? What's the best way to help kids learn this? And is there a role for tech in this? And where are the studies showing what the role of tech should be to benefit kids? It's two different questions, right?

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I mean, nothing says efficiency like AI. And you end your book with this kind of turn in the history of tech and education, where, you know, all of the sudden, all of the tech companies and code.org that have been pushing this computer science curricula are now saying the next big thing is AI. And code.org even changed its name to Code AI. So what does it say that after all of this, this industry and this group kind of just switched around, you know, what they're promoting in schools and for students to learn? And, you know, is it good for students to evolve with the

• 33:07Speaker 00

  times in that way? And that's just what we would expect? Or does that lack of consistency undermine their learning?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  I spent, you know, a few months last year talking to kids who'd majored in computer science, graduated from college, and were struggling to get a job and even to get an interview. And one of the students I interviewed, like, he said, every adult I met, every teacher, every neighbor since I was like in first grade told me, just learn to code, and you'll have this amazing job in tech. And he did that. Like, he learned HTML and was making websites in elementary school. You know, he made apps along the way in middle and high school. In college, he TA'd computer science. Like, he was devoted, and he loved it, right? He wasn't just doing it to get a job. He loved kind of the logic and the puzzle of programming. And so this was devastating to him. Like, you can say to kids, okay, you've majored in computer science. It's easy now for you to learn AI. You should

• 33:56Speaker 04

  just vibe code and use these AI tools. Or you should just pivot to be a forward-deployed engineer and consult with companies on how they should get more AI into their businesses. And like, some of the students said, like, I feel like the tech industry gaslighted me. And I feel devastated that I devoted all these years to this thing that, you know, nobody cares about anymore. And so one of my questions is, what do we owe these students who we spent a decade promising, high-paying, high-power tech jobs? And like, it may be only a few years of difficulties for these kids because there will be new kinds of AI jobs, and also because colleges are now integrating AI into teaching computer science.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  And code.org is not abandoning computer science. It's just making AI a bigger part of the way they teach computer science. On the other hand, this group, the Computer Science Teachers Association, which represents 10,000 teachers, has decided that computer science should center humans, not machines. And so I think that, like, one of the problems is, for schools, the tech industry evolves really, really fast and pivots really, really fast. And we see all these tech giants spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers and laying off people who are not involved in AI and just moving forward. And it gives schools whiplash, right? And like, do we want schools to race around and

• 35:19Speaker 04

  teach what the tech industry needs this month and then pivot two months later to teach what the tech industry needs now? And we see it already. Last year was like, oh, we can't have codeathons anymore because kids don't need to code. We'll have promptathons, and we'll teach kids to prompt, right? But AI is going so fast that you can just talk to it now. So now we switch from promptathons to, every kid needs to learn how to vibe code, right? And so I think the tension and the complication is, how do we teach kids durable skills that they can use to use any technology? And think about the impact of technology on society, you know, whether it's apps, social media, AI, or like quantum

• 36:00Speaker 04

  computing, which is the next thing, right? And I think that, like, that's one of the things schools are now going to have to figure out. Because education moves slowly for a reason, which is to protect kids from, like, education fads.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And just to wrap us up here, you know, how prepared are school districts and teachers to deal with this next turn in the industry from computer science into more AI? You know, will history just repeat itself with this next evolution?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  I'm optimistic. Because what I see, you know, in some of the teachers I visited in my book and talking to students is like, they want a broader-based kind of tech education, where kids learn to ask deep questions about how companies are steering us with their technology, how software and AI are designed to affect our choices, and what role students have to use the tools productively, but also to push back if they like. And to not feel like they're in a world where AI is driving them, right? Kids don't want AI-driven futures. They want human-driven futures. And if they want to use AI, they want to make the choices.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  And I think that's a really interesting turn that I see with some, like, pioneering teachers. Let's put kids in the driver's seat and not have them be like cogs for industry agendas. And, you know, you talk to high school students, and they have amazing views on this about what they think is okay and what they think is not okay.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Great. Well, Natasha, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. I really appreciate it and really enjoyed your book, Coding Kids, and all of your work in The New York Times. So thank you so much.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate your close reading, Lauren. I really do.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  That's it for The Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchek. See you next time.

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