Putting Students Ahead of Technology in America's Schools

0:00 Speaker 1 Lynn Shores, representing lynnswarriors.org and saving our kids. Well, Lynn, Sunday morning, give us an update. How many kids have we saved this week?

0:13 Speaker 2 We are saving all the kids this week, John. Look, America needs to wake up. We need to sound the alarm. Listen up and listen good, everybody. Big Tech has spent years convincing parents, educators, all of us, okay, that we need more screens in our schools, more technology. It will make our kids smarter, okay? Now these same corporations are

0:38 arriving with artificial intelligence, and they’re promising to protect our kids. But here’s the question, John, nobody seems to be willing to ask. They’re not talking about who gave these companies permission to experiment. I want to put that in capital letters, experiment on technology. an entire generation of our children? Who owns the information, you know, of our children, all this

0:58 artificial intelligence? Who’s profiting from all this? And where is all the, you know, evidence that this technology actually improves learning? Because we have learned at Lynn’s Warriors with everything coming forth, all the studies and the whistleblowers and internal memos, it has made our kids happy. well, for lack of a better word, dumber. Okay, they don’t have critical thinking, critical analysis.

1:21 But we want to point out, we believe children are not customers. We learned from internal memos of big tech companies Meta, okay, Google, YouTube, you name it, that their internal memos say kids are herd animals, kids are customers, we can hook them young and we’ll have them for life. So, look, classrooms belong to children and teachers, actual human beings, not

1:42 Silicon Valley. We say childhood is not for sale. But, John, this is the most disturbing thing happening as we’re talking. Microsoft is working right now with the American Federation of Teachers, okay, on artificial intelligence safety standards. standards. We don’t think that’s a very good thing, because we look at the history of all of this. Like, who is evaluating? Who chose

2:04 them to do this, John? Who’s evaluating compliance? Think of the motivation financially for everybody. Look, Microsoft has so much enormous commercial interest in education technology equals money. But what about our kids? So we need educators and parents and our experts, you know, coming together, independent researchers even, involved in decisions about the classroom with AI, John, the artificial intelligence.

2:29 We need everybody at the table because kids deserve more than corporate promises and these public relations campaigns. So our technology companies right now looking at our children as future customers, we say yes based on the history of everything we have found out. We have these memos that have come forward, the whistleblowers. But our kids, John, our future American adults

2:50 and leaders, I say that every week. So everybody’s got to step up. We live in a different environment. Look, parental autonomy, people have to get involved in the school systems. You’ve got to talk to your kids. You’ve got to talk to your educators. And you’ve got to become an active participant in your school, school board meetings. And you’ve

3:06 got to ask questions. No kid has to be. in the classroom, on a device. Do you know that, John? They’ll tell you in different schools, like, that’s the law. You have to use Chromebooks and all that. You do not.

3:17 You can ask for a textbook. You can ask for all of your assignments on paper. We need to spread this information because our kids, our kids are suffering, and we can’t. We saw from social media over the last two decades what happened to them. We’ve got to right now step up in front of this AI and get

3:34 this work done. Our children are not for sale.

3:38 Speaker 1 I agree with you 110%. And thank you for everything you do to help more children in America. And we stand, WABC stands side by side with you, with lynnswarriors.org, to make sure our kids have a better life.

3:56 Speaker 2 Thank you, John. You always support us, and it means so much. And we are making a tremendous difference across America.