Teaching Against the Machine: Critical Pedagogy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence (Critical Directions in Education, Technology, and Politics) - Softcover

Means, Alexander J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350506796 ISBN 13: 9781350506794

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

Synopsis

This book is an experimental critical pedagogy of artificial intelligence in relation to futures of capitalism, thought, education, politics, and radical imagination.

Teaching Against the Machine offers a searing account of artificial intelligence as a cultural and pedagogical force in an era of systemic nihilism. Alexander J. Means shows how AI extracts from the living archive of human creativity and knowledge only to degrade it through the financial, algorithmic, and military circuitry of late capitalism and its destructive geopolitics. Algorithmic systems disfigure collective memory, fragment thought, and attempt to foreclose a shared humanity and future. Refusing both transhumanist fantasy and apocalyptic fatalism, Means argues for an experimental critical pedagogy that can teach against the dead machines of the present. This is a book about reclaiming thought, time, imagination, and political agency. It investigates what education must become if it is to foster lives of meaning rather than surrender them to barbarism.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. He is the author of The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (2022), The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (2018) and The Politics of Education, 2nd edition (2018). He is a fellow of the National Educational Policy Center and a Fulbright Chair in Globalization and Culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350506796
• ISBN 13: 9781350506794
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224