Tom Hobson teaches preschool in Seattle, Washington. He is also a blogger.

He wrote here about the machinations of the greedy profiteers who want children to be taught by machines. He will not permit it. The children are his friends. The profiteers don’t give a damn about the children he teaches.

He begins like this:

I typically wait by the door or gate to greet the children as they arrive, “Hi Sarah! I’m happy to see you!” I say it because it’s how I would like to be greeted. In a way, I guess, you could consider it my version of shouting, “Norm!” the way the Cheers regulars did each time their beloved friend walked through the door.

I also say it because it’s true. I am happy to see each child walk through the door. I’m grateful they’ve come back. I’m grateful that their parents continue to trust me with their baby. I’m grateful that we are going to now spend hours together, just farting around, making stuff, imagining stuff, thinking about stuff and generally just goofing off. I’m even grateful for the times we get sad or angry, because those conflicts are a part of our friendship.

And that’s the thing, that’s the part that people who don’t do this job will never understand: the friendship. These kids are my friends, especially those who are back for a second or third year with me. We’re not even two weeks into the new school year and we’re already finishing each other’s sentences and cracking inside jokes. This is what I will remember from the too short time we spend together. It is also what they will remember. And we’ve got nine months of that ahead of us. Norm!

He adds:

Are we that stupid. People need other people, not just for procreation or telling stories or being happy or forming a team, but also for learning anything worth learning. We will figure out how to read and write and cipher as we always have: virally, by hanging out with other people, which is a system that has worked for most people throughout history. It’s been a largely successful system so why the hell would we mess with it? And that’s also, not incidentally, how we learn everything else: virally, by hanging out with other people. And that requires friendship, deep down real friendship. That, ultimately, is the source of extraordinary motivation.

Read their own documents, and you’ll see that they are planning to turn live, face-to-face teaching into a “premium service.” . . . Meaning that they know face-to-face instruction is a better way to learn, and they have no intention of having their own children learn from machines.

I am not laughing about this academic’s predictions. I’m girding myself because billionaires are behind this and they, despite their philanthropic BS, care primarily about making a killing at the expense of our kids. I will not permit children, my friends, to be turned over to machines. I want them to come to a place where everybody knows their name and where they’re always glad they came.

Friends don’t turn their friends over to machines. People need other people. Children need humans, not machines, to teach them.