Celestial Explorer

History

Pure Tech Secondary School (Formerly Downsview Secondary School), located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, converted to a fully remote, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-run institution in June 2040, and completed their first full school year under these changes during the September 2040 – June 2041 term. Following the Second Great Depression of the 2030s, the Ministry of Education felt pressure from Ontario’s Conservative Government to make changes to their budget and resolved that eliminating the need for any staff or physical building space would serve as the economical course of action. Pure Tech Secondary School served as the first school to emerge from these drastic changes as the Ministry evaluated its practicality and viability before implementing more of these same cuts across the province. The land that Downsview Secondary once stood upon was in turn sold, and Pure Tech Secondary School became a fully remote high school both taught and run by AI. Despite the overwhelming evidence from the 2020-2021 COVID-19 Pandemic that remote learning had catastrophic consequences for the mental health and general development of students (emotional, physical, academic, psychological), the capitalistic advantages to making this switch far outweighed the public’s concerns in the eyes of those in power. Given the requirement that students had access to their own personal holograms at home through which they could receive instruction from their AI teachers, there was an inevitable shift in the demographic of the student population within the first year of the school’s transformation. 80% of Pure Tech students came from families of high socioeconomic status, and of that number, 55% came from non-racialized families. Before the school’s transformation, 30% of the student population came from low-income households. A 10% decrease in this number was seen due to the lack of access these households had to resources that were required of them to keep their children at this school, and because of racial inequities, there was a correlated decrease in the diversity of the student population as well. These statistics have not seen much change in the five years since the school’s transformation. Despite rising questions of ethics and inclusivity, Pure Tech currently leads the Toronto District School Board in technological proficiency, computer engineering skills, and financial literacy. The school’s emphasis on these skills has set its students up for success in the real world as society continues to progress in a direction that favours those who have a strong background in these areas. Only time will tell whether these advantages are proportionate to the wide array of consequences that have emerged alongside them.