The Captivating Creature from Educaria and Other Scary Stories
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By Charles Logan
The monsters in my neighborhood are growing more grotesque. Walking my kids to and from school, we point to the latest additions. A rat poking from a zombie’s skull. A clown with a rigor mortis smile. My kids are especially enchanted by The Demon House. A mummy hangs upside down from the porch’s roof, a veiny eyeball lolling from a socket. Not one but two six-foot dragons, wings outstretched, glare at passersby. The eponymous demon clasps a screaming girl in his gnarled hands, and if you press a red button attached to the fence, smoke streams from the girl’s mouth into the demon’s mouth while the demon snarls, “Your soul belongs to me now!” My kids like to press the button. Frightened, thrilled, they run down the street shrieking, gather their courage, and ask if we can visit The Demon House one more time.
The monsters’ powerful pull over my kids has me reflecting on the monster unit that I used to teach in my 10th grade English class. I loved teaching that unit for lots of reasons. For instance, I had an excuse to introduce my students to Angela Carter. But perhaps more importantly, I think the students appreciated learning that monsters make for seriously fun study. I based the unit on modified versions of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” focusing on three theses: Thesis I: The Monster’s Body Is Pure Culture; Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis; and Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold…of Becoming. We used Cohen’s theses to analyze the monsters in the stories that we read. For the unit’s final project, students worked in small groups to create and analyze a monster that was, as Cohen writes in his first thesis, “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment–of a time, a feeling, and a place.” That place? Our school.
Like any proud teacher, I’ve kept the students’ drawings, and you can see their brilliance for yourself:
So I’ve been thinking about monsters–and I’ve also been thinking about magic, because standing amid The Demon House’s mummy, dragons, and demon is a sorcerer. His beard is long and white; he wears a purple cloak; and in his cupped hands he holds a glowing blue orb. Monsters and magic. Twice a day, I’m confronted with monsters and magic. The scene mingles with another of my preoccupations: AI. Monsters, magic, and AI. I turn them over in my head while I walk along Greenleaf Street, cross Chicago Avenue, and climb the stairs to my apartment. Monsters, magic, and AI.
I’m not the first to make various connections between monsters, magic, AI, and ed-tech. You can read Audrey Watters’ four-part series The Monsters of Ed-Tech (and, if you’re like me, celebrate Watters’ return to ed-tech criticism, this time with a focus on AI). Ben Williamson wrote about Google Classroom’s AI “magic” and how the rhetoric clouds the company’s attempts at greater automation and corporate control of education. More broadly, M. C. Elish and danah boyd argue proponents of Big Data and AI obscure the technologies’ limitations by claiming they “work like magic”; Brian Merchant compares generative AI to a magic lantern; and Peter Nagy and Gina Neff detail how Big Tech uses the “conjuration of algorithms” to imbue their products with enticing magical powers. My little contribution to this conversation is to consider how we might apply Cohen’s monster theory to analyzing ed-tech’s monsters, or if you’ll permit me the reframing, ed-tech’s mascots-as-monsters. What might this look like in practice?
Enter MagicSchool and its fuzzy mascot. In June of 2024, MagicSchool received $15 million in private funding and, according to founder and CEO Adeel Khan, was being used by “2 million teachers plus more than 3,000 schools and districts.” Around the same time as the cash infusion from Bain Capital Ventures, Common Sense Media, and others, MagicSchool announced a rebrand, including a new mascot.
MagicSchool AI’s mascot. The company makes the images available for presentations.
An innocuous bunny, right? Wrong! If Monty Python has taught me anything, it’s that seemingly adorable rabbits are ruthless beasts. And while the MagicSchool bunny isn’t gorging on jugulars (yet), the creature’s arrival and body do, according to Cohen’s first thesis, symbolize disturbances. Recall that in his first thesis, Cohen writes that a monster is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment–of a time, a feeling, and a place.” Let’s consider the timing of MagicSchool’s rabbit. (The rabbit, as far as I can tell, remains unnamed, even though MagicSchool asked users to tweet their suggestions to gain “early access to our Beta Chrome Extension.”) MagicSchool’s marketing team introduced the rabbit in late June 2024, a time when most teachers are done for the academic year. I remember that time well; it was a period to relax, rejuvenate, relax some more, and finally pick the one or two things that I wanted to learn over the summer in order to incorporate them into my teaching the next school year. I read the timing of the rabbit’s arrival as a business strategy–and more.
Cohen notes that a monster is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment,” and our current cultural moment in education is largely characterized by AI discourse. There’s the fanciful discourse offered by MagicSchool and its competitors; then there’s the stark reality, as Dan Meyer has pointed out, that most teachers are not using AI. MagicSchool’s rabbit is a product of these daily disconnects, of an ed-tech marketplace seeking to enchant teachers and school leaders with promises of magical AI’s transformative powers. The clashing narratives, pressures, and usage rates make for a witch’s brew of bubbling emotions. Cohen’s first thesis makes explicit the relationship between a monster’s body and a society’s emotions. For Cohen, “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy.” For me, that means considering what fears, desires, anxieties, and fantasies are revealed by the rabbit’s body.
The MagicSchool bunny is cute, maybe a little dopey with those big teeth and Groucho Marx eyebrows. The grin communicates friendliness. The overall impression is a welcoming fuzzball, the kind of mascot made to pose for selfies at an ed-tech conference. In other words, the rabbit embodies MagicSchool’s desire to befriend–and perhaps bewitch–educators and school administrators, with a goal of a lucrative enterprise contract. If the rabbit’s body conveys a desire for an expanded user base, then the wand and sparkle illustrate how MagicSchool imagines achieving this desire: through a fantasy of AI-as-magic. However, as Ben Williamson writes, “AI is of course not magic. The discourse and imaginary of magical AI obscures the complex social, economic, technical and political efforts involved in its development, hides its internal mechanisms, and disguises the wider effects of such systems.” The rabbit’s very cuteness is a tell, an attempt to dress up and distract from interlocking systems and the harms that often result from building, training, and deploying AI.
MagicSchool’s rabbit’s body contains more than an ed-tech company’s desires and fantasies. Take the image of the rabbit merrily splashing coffee from a tilted mug. Coffee is a daily requirement for a lot of teachers, and by placing the rabbit in the mug, MagicSchool is suggesting its AI tools may become a daily routine too. As an AI skeptic, that visual argument makes me anxious. And if I push the image further, and accept that I might be consuming this rabbit with my morning coffee, I’m left wondering what will happen to the rabbit? Am I supposed to swallow it whole? And then what? Will the rabbit and I merge? Or will the unnamed thing punch through my chest, Alien-like, to wreak havoc? Yes, I’m being extreme, but I’m also trying to name a fear that exists in and through the rabbit’s body: that accepting MagicSchool into my life risks losing some of what makes me me, as I turn over pesky things like designing lesson plans to MagicSchool’s hydra of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
My hyperbolic imaginings are not totally unfounded. When the company announced its rebrand, MagicSchool also included this narrative about the rabbit: “Because every good rabbit has an origin story...In the heart of Educaria, a remarkable rabbit emerges. Beyond its adorable appearance, this bunny possesses an unwavering dedication to supporting educators worldwide. Equipped with magical powers and tech expertise, this captivating creature is destined to revolutionize education.” MagicSchool’s press release is an example of what Audrey Watters describes as ed-tech agitprop, or a story sold by a company to shape its preferred (profitable) future. What’s more, this origin story is further evidence of the interconnected fears, desires, anxieties, and fantasies found in the rabbit’s body. Let’s look closer at two details.
First, the rabbit emerges from “the heart of Educaria.” Not “the warren” or “the realm” or “the center” but “the heart,” with all its symbolic powers of love. This rabbit–this company–desires educators’ love, subscriptions, and data. In addition, I read “Educaria” as a portmanteau of “education” and “care.” There’s love again–and something else, something darker. Autumm Caines, my fellow Civics of Technology board member, has written about the weaponization of care, and how “companies embed the language of care in their rhetoric around new surveillance technologies — particularly when they hope to normalize them in more consequential and intimate parts of our lives.” I think MagicSchool is up to something similar with Educaria. I understand MagicSchool’s argument like this: we care about education, you care about education, and because we both care about education, then using our platform is a good way for you to show you care about your teaching and your students.
I should say that I do think the company’s employees want to improve education. We differ on our theory of change. I don’t believe school leaders should be spending precious funds on another untested technology that further concentrates the power of Big Tech.
My distrust is further heightened by a second noteworthy diction choice in MagicSchool’s description of the rabbit. The unnamed thing is a “captivating creature.” The alliteration emphasizes that this is a creature–a monster, I argue–in search of captives, of principals, teachers, and students to turn into a captive and captivated audience. The everpresent desire for customers locked in to a platform lurks beneath the story’s surface, producing anxieties and fears of confinement alongside fantasies of how this technology will “revolutionize education.”
The strategies ed-tech companies use to ensnare captive audiences echoes a recent argument theorizing Big Tech’s speculative capture of AI literacy. According to Civics of Technology board members Phil Nichols and Allie Thrall and their co-authors Julian Quiros and Ezekiel Dixon-Román, “the indeterminacy that marks literacy education's speculative project makes it vulnerable both to cooptation by those of AI platforms and to being remade by the preemptive reasoning that animates them. We theorize this vulnerability as a process of speculative capture.” Notably, the unnamed rabbit “is destined to revolutionize education” (emphasis mine). In other words, MagicSchool’s rabbit is a vehicle equipped with “preemptive reasoning” to establish AI’s predestined future in classrooms. “The Captivating Creature from Educaria” is not a soothing bedtime story; it is a warning.
We would do well to heed the story’s warning and listen to its monster. Cohen agrees. In his seventh thesis, Cohen argues that monsters bring knowledge to help us better understand ourselves, writing that, “These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place.” MagicSchool and other ed-tech companies are heavily invested in using AI hype to conjure a present and future where AI is perceived as a magic so powerful it transforms education. If a teacher wishes to learn the spells and sorcery, then the platform will happily oblige for a price. MagicSchool and other ed-tech companies insist they care about teachers, and they prefer to demonstrate this care by removing from teachers’ lives the work of emails, lesson plans, Individualized Education Programs, assessments, grading, on and on. ”I can help you do more with less,” whispers the unnamed rabbit. I refuse the siren song of automated austerity schooling. If a teacher’s labor conditions are the perceived problem to solve, then it’s wishful thinking to wave a sparkly, magic AI wand and–poof!–you’ve got your hours back. Meanwhile, the complex systems and the neoliberal ideology that maintain those deteriorating labor conditions go ignored, the magician’s sleight of hand redirecting the collective gaze, dollars, and political will elsewhere.
I’ve spent a while on MagicSchool’s rabbit, I know. Other ed-tech mascots-as-monsters deserve our attention too. How might we make sense of Duo, the famous green owl from Duolingo, and his gradual evolution? How do we interpret Duo’s intensifying cuteness in relation to Duolingo’s CEO’s embrace of AI as a cost-saving mechanism and his blasé attitude toward “Nazi stuff” students might encounter when using Duolingo’s AI features. Then there’s the true stuff of nightmares: ClassDojo’s menagerie of monsters.
Redefining ed-tech mascots as monsters allows us to apply Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory to better analyze the cultures and narratives shaping the roles of technology in school. I share Phil and Allie’s questions about using a literacy framework for AI and platforms more broadly, but if we’re committed to developing teachers’ and students’ literacies about technology, then I think reading ed-tech’s monsters as texts can be a vital practice that opens new lines of inquiry, understanding, and intervention. I think it’s helpful to know how these monsters and their scary stories work. When I’m with my kids and we pass The Demon House, I’ve learned to point out the wires. I squat next to my preschoolers and together we follow where the orange extension cord emerges from the demon’s tattered cloak, trails through the grass, and plugs into a covered outlet.
“See?” I say. “That’s where the power comes from. It’s not so scary after all.”