Learning machines (short story)

This post includes the full text of my short story 'Learning machines', recently published in issue 60.1 (2025) of Australian Journal of English Education.

Term 4, 2042, and Ana was almost finished Year 10. Sitting at the dining table with her laptop, she angled her tablet off to the left as a second screen. The eye tracking software installed on her machine had been blissfully defective since July, meaning she could watch shows and chat with her friends in the background of her classes.

In Queensland, she was glad they hadn’t opted for the ‘buzzkill’, as her friends in Victoria called it. Down there, they’d all gotten chips in their arms when they enrolled in Prep. The chips gave them a blast if they missed school, even if they chucked a sickie! Up here you could miss ten days a year, more if you had a medical report. If not, then it was school for you, from age four to 17.

But this didn’t mean you always had to go to the actual school. As long as you did your ‘four-by-four’, everyone was happy. For four days a week, every Queensland kid was required to do four hours of Flexibly Programmed Learning, or FPL. In the backchannels her friends called it FML.

The Programs were a series of short texts, recorded teaching, quizzes, games, team challenges, and invigilated exams, all feeding your learning data in real time into a daily score board.

Whether you went to school for the day or stayed home, you still had to do the Programs.

At school it was usually more fun, with friends to hang around with in break times and space away from your family. But on “hybrid learning” days at least you could stay in your couch clothes with unwashed hair, and nobody minded. And as far as families went, hers wasn’t that bad. At least there was always an adult home, between Mum, Dan and Nan, otherwise she’d have to get dropped at a State Supervision Shelter between 10am-2pm.

In Queensland, every family was paid a weekly benefit for every child enrolled in school. This had been brought in during the early 30s, when the state government had gotten fed up with no-one taking school seriously anymore. Ana’s Nan was still an English teacher then, but when the Programs came in, she said it had been the last straw. Said she ‘refused to be reduced to an enforcement officer, roaming a giant study hall to monitor kids on their screens and calling it ‘teaching’!’, so she signed up for the “verso” – universal basic wage – and started volunteering instead.

Now every kid enrolled in school could earn your family “learno” money each week, but only if they attended their mandatory hours and finished enough Programs with a high enough weekly score.

If your family was rich enough, you could enrol in a private school that was exempt from running the Programs. Some of these were the old city schools, where enrolments had been halved to enable parts of the school to be turned into housing for students. It was easier to just stay on campus when the weather heaved and locked everyone down. Others were boutique, community schools, set up in a variety of innovative ways to distribute learning via grassroots channels during fires, grey-outs and floods. Of these, some were thriving networks of mutual education and benefit. Others defaulted to “self-directed learning” when the going got tough, but if the fees were paid it was known these schools would pass any student through to the next grade.

If anyone in your family was on the verso though, you were barred from paying for private school. They figured that if you were rich enough for fancy school, you weren’t poor enough for a government sponsored wage.

Some of her Queensland friends were off-grid and didn’t have to sit through school curriculum or programming at all. The off-gridders weren’t all literally off the grid, though some were. Just off the school grid, no Programs, no payments. These kids used to be called home-schooled, but that became a weird thing to call them after hybrid learning policies gave all kids in public schools the right to stay home. The State’s version of “a truly inclusive approach”; and besides, the extreme weather raging along the coastline these days meant that all schools spent smatterings or swathes of the year closed to students anyway.

That’s what had landed Ana at home today, and for the past two weeks. School closure: Floods. The Emergency education facility closures website was one every family had bookmarked, and one that rarely showed a ‘zero closures’ count. The Hills Secondary College hadn’t been open since school went back after the holidays, and it had been Programs at the dining table since then. The one glimmer on the horizon was her weekly check in with her peer tutor, Valerie, who would join their video classroom any minute now.

Ting ting-ting! Ting ting-ting!

Valerie’s face flashed up to the right of her own.

‘Morning kiddo!’, chirped Valerie. ‘Finish the book yet?’.

Indeed, she had, up late last night with a flashlight on, after the power went out.

‘Yeah, I did – and I have views!’. Ana launched right into a breakdown of her latest reading, an eco-critical young adult novel from 2024 called Into the Mouth of the Wolf by Erin Gough. Throughout the year Valerie had passed Ana a rotation of books from her home library, and they had increasingly used their peer tutoring time as an ad hoc book club instead of doing the timetabled peer assessment and mindfulness drills. They’d been on a 2020s jag recently after re-reading Jessica Townsend’s classic Nevermoor series over winter. Will Kostakis’ We Could Be Something was next up, halfway through on her bedside table and she was loving it already.

Ana loved the books. Although the Programs were supposed to be highly personalised, there was only so much they could do with the content they had.

When the Programs were commissioned, the Queensland Learnification Authority had made copyright and licensing deals for just enough material to fill a basic learning sequence for every year. Year 10 English, for example, became a suite of curriculum-aligned learning resources, that used “evidence-based strategies” to “motivate and analyse learning”. The Authority had spent a serious load of money on advice from some centre of ‘experts’ to get it right. Well, someone’s version of right. The texts in the basic Program were Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a novel called Jasper Jones, and five poems each by Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Wilfred Owen, all of which Ana had finished by the end of Term 2.

The idea had been that more texts would be added in future years so the options would be plentiful, and the learning could be designed with student interests in mind, but the funding for new additions never came. Instead, the Education Minister took the cheaper option of adding gamified general education modules from global mega-company FaceLearn.

That’s the story the way her Nan told it anyway.

‘Val! We’re nearly over time! K-K-talktoyounextweek! Ok-byyyyyyye-!’ Ana hurried to close down the video call. The FaceLearn calls were strictly timed and if you went over your allocated ‘guided practice’ minutes, you couldn’t get full points for independently finishing the task in the Program daily scores.

Efficient learning was the most effective learning.

Valerie’s avatar flashed on the tablet screen in their chat window. The text popped onto the screen, ‘Made it!’.

Ana punched the air, ‘Yesss!’. Ana’s weekly learning score was looking good, but Valerie needed perfect scores on her last four weekly tasks, or her learno payment would be suspended for the week.

Stretching, Ana cued up a retro movie recommended by another friend, a FaceLearn online peer from up north. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. She thought she remembered her dad showing her a bunch of memes from this when she was a kid, frowning as she wondered if would be too jarring to watch. Memefied media could be tricky that way.

Ding!

A system alert on the laptop. Could the school be reopening?

‘Eye tracker software issues resolved. Please reboot your learning machine within 48 hours and install new drivers to maintain Learner Engagement Payments.’

A gust of wind rattled the window and the rain kicked up a notch in its force. No, the school would be closed another week yet, she reckoned.

Ana closed her eyes for a moment, then took a deep breath and opened her next Program.

—

This short story is a creative response to Allan Luke’s reflection on ‘AI and the deskilling of teachers’ work’, both appearing in Australian Journal of English Education 60.1 (2025), with a companion story by Jo O’Mara about a dystopian future in Victoria titled ‘What’s past is prologue’.