A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #35-25 - Schools and Artificial Intelligence. NextGen AI: Growing Corporatization of the Education Sector (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

From October 8 to 13, 2025, Naples hosted the "Next Generation AI - 
International Summit on Artificial Intelligence in Schools," an event 
presented by the Ministry of Education and Merit as "the largest 
initiative ever held in Italy on AI applied to educational and training 
processes."
A full week of conferences, workshops, masterclasses, evening 
performances, guided tours, interactive installations, and-most 
importantly-a huge turnout of companies, startups, and educational 
technology providers ready to showcase their products to teachers, 
administrators, and school staff.

The official program distributed to delegations and institutions is 
impressive in terms of the number of names involved and the lack of 
policy reflection. The topics discussed included "personalization of 
learning," "efficiency of school processes," "digital tutoring," 
"virtual reality," and "conversational AI." But the underlying theme 
running through the entire summit is clear: the school of the future 
must become a market and a system to be optimized, not an educational 
community to be strengthened.

Leafing through the program, one gets the impression not of a public 
event on education but of a trade fair, a showcase summit for the AI 
industry. Google, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, DXC Technology, 
Campustore, Giunti, Zanichelli, Lutech, Hevolus, STEMBLOCKS: dozens of 
companies, large and small, present "innovative solutions" for every 
aspect of the school ecosystem.

Schools become places of private experimentation, where AI is used as a 
tool to introduce proprietary platforms, immersive environments, 
tracking systems, and "intelligent" tools for monitoring students, 
teachers, and administrative processes.

Nothing, however, is mentioned about privacy, digital rights, 
technological sovereignty, maintenance costs, the risk of dependence on 
foreign vendors, or the sheer volume of data collected and processed by 
these solutions. The only intervention dedicated to data protection was 
a brief appearance by the Italian Data Protection Authority, wedged 
between panels: the fig leaf needed to certify the operation as 
"responsible."

The summit revolves around the salvific rhetoric of AI and the now 
ubiquitous mantra: AI will improve schools, personalize learning, 
simplify procedures, and make teaching more inclusive and creative. This 
narrative presents technology as a technical solution to political 
problems: job insecurity, overcrowded classes, insufficient staffing, 
regional inequalities, dilapidated school buildings, and educational 
poverty. All issues that no algorithm can resolve. Paradoxically, the 
summit is taking place while many Italian schools lack teachers, 
janitors, administrators, adequate classrooms, and functioning internet 
connections. But AI is becoming the new decoy: a way to divert attention 
from what one does not want to address.

It is also worth noting that students played no leading role in this summit.

Students are present in the program, but only as delegations, extras, 
and audience members.
There are no panels where students discuss what it really means to live 
in an increasingly digitalized, data-ified, and platform-mediated 
school. School, instead of being conceived as a living community, is 
reduced to a field of application for digital innovation. Students are 
not political subjects, but "users of intelligent technologies."
The underlying message is clear: schools must become "more efficient," 
"data-driven," more like businesses. AI not as a critical tool, but as a 
management infrastructure that helps monitor, simplify, optimize, and 
control. There's talk of "AI for school administration," "AI for data 
security," "AI for institutional management." This is the neoliberal 
agenda that has been affecting education for years: transforming public 
schools into measurable, segmentable, and profileable systems.
And yet, this is certainly not what schools need. The educational 
challenge of the future isn't equipping students with digital assistants 
or VR headsets, but something very different. It's strengthening 
academic freedom, investing in stable staff, reducing regional 
disparities, ensuring dignified educational spaces and time, and 
building critical and inclusive communities. Technology can help, of 
course. But only if it doesn't become a Trojan horse for the digital 
colonization of public schools.

The NextGen AI Summit, however, tells a different story: that of a 
school transformed into a playground for companies, where the state acts 
as a political guarantor and education becomes a market opportunity. A 
story that deserves to be told, and criticized, precisely because 
schools should be defended as a common good.

Totò Caggese

https://umanitanova.org/scuola-e-intelligenza-artificiale-nextgen-ai-cresce-laziendalizzazione-del-settore-educativo/
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