Robot wars in the classroom: why AI in education is nothing new

As the role of AI in education sparks debate, Laura Tisdall examines past technological advances in teaching, and how they were received at the time

Illustration of a teacher standing atop a precarious stack of obsolete technology – TV, radio, computer, laptop – teaching from a book, while a large screen beside her displays an AI chatbot interface

Published: September 28, 2026 at 3:56 PM

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In 1929, the British magazine Teachers World identified ‘A Possible Menace to the Free Development of Education’. The putative culprit was BBC Radio, which had begun its schools broadcasting programme five years earlier, provoking fears that teachers would simply become ‘machine minders’. Such concerns pre-dated radios, though. The first ‘teaching machines’ were developed in the US in the 19th century; it was claimed that they could, for example, teach students to spell by getting them to turn a crank to arrange letters in the correct order.

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Panic reached fever pitch by the 1960s, when new electronic ‘automatic teachers’ emerged, popularised by the American psychologist BF Skinner. More widely, commentators ranging from Canadian radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (in The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) to US businessman Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970) predicted that humanoid robots would soon be indistinguishable from real people. Such an “inhuman, mechanical monster”, as one TV journalist put it in 1965 on encountering a teaching machine, was the face of the imagined future.

Black-and-white photograph of schoolchildren lined up watching two men demonstrate an early wireless radio set with a large horn speaker

Pupils at Hugh Myddleton School in London listen to their new wireless set, c1925. Fears that teachers would simply become ‘machine minders’, voiced later that decade, proved unfounded | Credit: Getty Images

Anxieties about human teachers becoming redundant have so far proved unfounded, though worries have re-emerged periodically with the inception of computers, the internet and, most recently, generative AI in the form of large language models (LLMs). But the introduction of new technologies into the British classroom often sits alongside surprising continuities in the structure of schooling and the role of the teacher. Teachers have lost a significant amount of autonomy over the past 40 years as relationships with the central state have changed. But the power they hold over students in the classroom has been maintained or even intensified.

Mass education

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory elementary education, originally until the age of 10, in England and Wales; similar legislation followed in Scotland in 1872. Local education authorities (LEAs), established in 1902, had the task of schooling large numbers of children, often in very poor conditions. So new technologies such as ‘readers’ – printed collections of extracts on different topics – or early projection equipment (‘magic lanterns’) could be very helpful.

Teachers continued to struggle with classes of up to 40 or even 50 children into the mid-20th century, especially in poorer rural areas, and school radio and television programmes offered means of engaging interest. On the other hand, the teachers and students who most needed these technologies were often those to whom they weren’t accessible. One secondary school in Ely was not atypical: in 1962, it still lacked wall maps, a projector and science apparatus, and had barely any books.

School inspectors sometimes addressed the impacts of limited funding from LEAs by bringing in needed items themselves – though these were often modest, such as “a large roll of kitchen paper and some tins of powder paint” given to an Oxfordshire junior school in 1959.

New classroom technologies often received a mixed reception among teachers, who might have felt as if their expertise was being undermined by ‘trendy’ ideas. In the 1980s, fears also intensified that technology could break down the distinction between childhood and adulthood. The American cultural critic Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) that television challenged the authority of adults by giving children unfettered access to information. “Without secrets,” he wrote, “of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.”

Black-and-white photograph of schoolboys watching a 'BBC Television for Schools' broadcast on a television set at the front of a classroom, with a teacher perched on a desk beside them

Pupils at a Kent secondary school watch a BBC Schools programme in 1957. Television provided a helpful tool for engaging large classes | Credit: BBC

Children themselves gave these ideas short shrift. “Childhood does not disappear because you watch TV,” 10-year-old Joseph told Postman in 1994. And teachers’ authority in the classroom remained basically unchallenged. Many British students did not feel respected by their teachers in schools, as responses to the Scottish School Leavers’ Survey from the 1980s show. “Some of the teachers were… power mad, big headed,” wrote one boy in 1983. Despite the efforts of child-led school student unions in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce innovations such as school councils and student representation on governing bodies, students still had little say in what they learned or how they learned it.

In the 1980s, fears intensified that technology could break down the distinction between childhood and adulthood

Learning by doing

Many technological innovations in postwar Britain were related to the rise of ‘child-centred education’ in primary and secondary schools, intended to suit students’ ‘natural interests’, a philosophy epitomised in the Plowden Report of 1967. One pedagogical idea promoted by child-centred educationalists was ‘learning by doing’, suggesting that children learned best when they actively found out things for themselves.

Building on earlier pieces of teaching apparatus, such as the Montessori sense-training materials of interwar kindergartens, educational innovators pushed technologies such as Cuisenaire rods. These were coloured sticks that could be used to teach basic mathematical operations. However, teachers were often sceptical of the value of these materials – and, indeed, of ‘learning by doing’ itself. “Is there nothing to maths but bits of wood?” complained a columnist in Teachers World in 1971.

Black-and-white photograph of a young child carefully stacking a tall tower of wooden building blocks

An infant at a Montessori school in 1919 plays a game designed to nurture problem-solving. Many teachers were sceptical of such approaches | Credit: Getty Images

Other technologies were more empowering for teachers because they built on their existing expertise. Before the 1980s, education in Britain was highly decentralised. This gave teachers significant control over what they taught, encouraged by initiatives such as the Mode 3 CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education), introduced in 1965, which allowed teachers to choose their own topics and set their own exams. Teachers used photocopiers and Bandas (a British brand name for a spirit duplicator) to make classroom resources, and employed overhead projectors to display this material easily to students. “My fingers are still stained purple,” recalled one enthusiast of the Banda machine.

A major constraint on the adoption of new technologies in the British classroom was funding. Central government did not provide dedicated funds for equipment in schools until the early 1980s, leaving them at the mercy of local authority budgets. And when funds were allocated, the focus was on electronic technologies – mainly computers, but also other innovations such as interactive whiteboards. This was not necessarily what teachers or students wanted; most continued to value older, under-funded technologies such as textbooks, though some embraced digital possibilities.

This pattern of spending began with the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major, then accelerated under New Labour after 1997, with a 2009 Ofsted report estimating that £2bn had been spent on information and communications technology (ICT) over the previous decade. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency was set up in 1998 to promote ICT, which also became a compulsory part of the curriculum. Today, we see the same thing happening with generative AI – expensive pilot projects being funded to develop new GenAI education tools.

Black-and-white photograph of a group of schoolchildren gathered around several desktop computers in a classroom, smiling for the camera

Pupils try out new computers at Bilton High School, Rugby, in 1988. Electronic technologies were the focus of government funding that decade | Credit: Getty Images

Teachers have expressed mixed opinions on new technologies. The Labour proposal earlier this year to develop ‘AI tutors’ to help disadvantaged students in Years 9 and 10 (13 to 15-year-olds) was strongly criticised by the National Education Union (NEU), with an NEU survey revealing that only 14 per cent of respondents supported the plan. However, teachers’ views on GenAI change when they are the ones using the technology: 76 per cent report using GenAI for day-to-day work.

Students, meanwhile, are not necessarily uniformly enthusiastic. Responding to a 2025 survey by the National Literacy Trust, 66.5 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds reported using GenAI; however, many were aware of its potential pitfalls. One student did not want to use GenAI in written work because “It wouldn’t be actually what I truly think, it would be a vague interpretation of what I’ve told a robot to expand on, and it might not even make sense”.

In the 1980s, most teachers and students continued to value older, under-funded technologies such as textbooks

Digital natives

Some digital technologies, such as the internet, initially promised students the ability to overtake teachers, with children and teenagers framed in the 1990s as a ‘net generation’ or ‘digital natives’. “For the first time ever, in one domain the students will be the teachers and the teachers will be the students,” argued the Canadian writer Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997). But the internet, like television, has failed to truly disrupt power hierarchies between adults and children.

Some digital technologies, such as the internet, initially promised students the ability to overtake their teachers

Teacher autonomy in the classroom has been less threatened by new technologies than by political decisions that have removed power from local authorities. These included the introduction of the first GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) in 1986, the National Curriculum of 1988, and the introduction of academies in 2000. Teachers have lost much of the control they once had over the curriculum and teaching methods. However, other power relationships within schools have persisted unchallenged. The idea of ‘student voice’ is often promoted but has failed to become a reality. A report on pupil participation in Welsh schools found in 2022 that only 23 per cent of students felt they had a say over school policies.

Photograph of a teacher leading a maths lesson using an interactive whiteboard, with a pupil raising their hand to answer

From the 1970s, technologies such as overhead projectors – being used here at a Middlesbrough school in 2004 – provided new ways for teachers to communicate concepts to classes | Credit: Getty Images

Though certain technologies, such as GenAI, are promoted in classrooms because they are seen to teach valuable work-related skills, others are framed as harmful. Smartphones have been banned in English schools this year, and the use of most social media platforms by under-16s is to be banned altogether across the UK in spring 2027.

At the same time, the government’s New Media Unit hires for jobs such as ‘Social Content Creator’ – with requirements including: “You are a true social media native who knows exactly how to capture an audience’s attention in the first three seconds across TikTok” – suggesting that these skills should be on employability agendas.

In How Children Fail (1964), the radical American educator and teacher John Holt argued that hierarchical, compulsory, competitive schooling discourages children from learning. That kind of education, Holt suggested, drove children to focus on getting the right answers on tests rather than being intrinsically motivated to seek knowledge for its own sake.

In the context of a school system that has changed little since the Second World War, at least in terms of relationships between teachers and children, misuse of technologies such as LLMs is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is unsurprising that students who feel they have little control over their own education might turn to GenAI to produce work that they did not choose to do in the first place.

In some ways, GenAI presents genuinely new challenges for schools, even when compared with the impact of older technologies such as the calculator, the television, the computer and the internet. In other ways, though, it shows how much schools have remained the same. As in past eras, hopes and fears about the potential of new technologies in the classroom should make us think about who chooses these technologies, who funds them, and who gets to control them.

Laura Tisdall is senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, and author of We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026)

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This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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