Schools across the world are experimenting with AI tools, usually to the dismay of unsuspecting parents. But one privately-run school is explicitly embracing AI as part of its sales pitch, and the in-class experience sounds more bizarre than anything you’d imagine.

A blistering new article by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley took a look under the hood of Alpha School, a private K-12 school company in the US which boasts an AI-based teaching model, among other highly dubious features.

To make the grade, high school students are required to pass an eight-week “bootcamp.” After being invited to follow social media accounts of other students at Alpha School, Riley observed a process more akin to hazing than high school orientation, as the private company made its prospective pupils jump through increasingly degrading hoops to secure their spot on the roster.

For example, students in the bootcamp are required to start a brand-new account on X-formerly-Twitter, for which they’re required to get a minimum of 100 organic followers, pay for X Premium, and post an unknown number of replies to “bigger accounts with real substance,” as one student explained.

“‘Great post’ replies don’t count,” the anonymous student posted in a screenshot shared by Riley. “Buying followers or spamming = automatic fail.”

But forced social media assignments are just the beginning. As part of the bootcamp, students are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.

“The challenge rule was simple,” one student wrote: “my resting heart rate was 80bpm, and I had to stay within 10 percent of that the whole time. Anything above 88 was a fail.”

It isn’t clear what educational purpose this particular trial was supposed to serve, or what the penalty would be for students who fail the heart rate challenge, or the boot camp overall. At least one student said the eight-week hazing period is meant to “prove I deserve to be here,” though Alpha School didn’t comment on Riley’s inquiry.

“I ended up averaging 87bpm,” the student continued, evidently just barely making the grade. “Barely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon.”

Additionally, Riley noted that Alpha School “requires students to do unpaid labor cleaning restaurant kitchens or gas-station bathrooms” in a test of “grit and hard work.”

This “assignment,” confirmed by two Alpha School pupils, involved students recording themselves and narrating their tasks, with any complaint or negative comment resulting in an automatic fail.

“We have to find and execute an unglamorous job with zero pay, whether that means mucking horse stalls, cleaning grease traps after closing, washing trash bins, or scrubbing gas station bathrooms,” one of the students explained.

Other challenges abound, like a requirement to complete an entire unit of a standard Advanced Placement course without a teacher — AI chatbots only — and pass an exam within just five days. One 14-year-old student wrote that they were required to survive for three days in an unfamiliar section of wilderness “with only 3 bags of rice and a tent.”

Contacted by Riley for comment, Alpha School flipped the script, hounding the writer for daring to report on the “social media activity of minor children.”

“We ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities,” an Alpha School representative said.

Responding to Riley’s story, educator and writer Audrey Watters said that “Alpha School’s promises have always been mostly snake-oil: this idea that artificial intelligence can deliver high-speed, high-quality education is mostly the stuff of science fiction, not reality.”

“What we witness with Alpha School isn’t a matter of simply ignoring the weatherman, fingers-crossed hoping that the sun will continue to shine on the chosen few and that the winds will shift again in industry’s favor,” Watters continued, referring to rising outrage against AI, and the Silicon Valley-ethos underlying Alpha School’s mission. “Rather, it’s pretty clear that there’s an absence of any moral compass at all.”

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