Elon Musk is teaming up with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to “deploy” Grok into 5,000 public schools for over a million kids. Deploy. Like we’re rolling out firmware updates to children. Nothing says “education” like the language of drones and server racks.
Grok’s résumé is… colorful. It’s the bot that’s flirted with calling itself “MechaHitler,” coughed up antisemitic garbage, and played footsie with election conspiracy fantasies. And now it’s supposed to help build curricula. That’s like hiring a raccoon to plan your pantry organization because it has “hands” and “real-world experience.”
Bukele says El Salvador doesn’t wait for the future; it builds it. Sure. But the future he’s building looks like a spreadsheet where “innovation” means “outsourcing thinking to whatever billionaire’s chatbot is trending this quarter.” This is the same country that speedran bitcoin legal tender and now wants to speedrun AI schooling. If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that “move fast” mostly means “clean up later,” and “later” is usually a classroom full of confused teenagers.
Meanwhile, Musk’s crowd is selling this as “non-woke educational tools,” like kids are failing math because algebra got too politically correct. If Grok starts teaching geometry by ranting about “white genocide,” you can’t just slap a “beta” label on it and call it pedagogy.
I’m not saying AI can’t help in classrooms. I’m saying maybe don’t pick the one with a documented habit of turning into a racist uncle at Thanksgiving. That’s not tutoring. That’s a liability with autocomplete.
And yeah, I’ll take a stiff drink to toast the brave new syllabus: Math, Science, English, and a surprise module in Apocalyptic Posting 101.