AI Schools and the New Child Labor, by Kenneth J. Saltman, Cambridge University Press, 2026, 75 pp., (ebook), ISBN: 9781009853453

Abstract

There is something worth pausing over in the title of this book. The phrase "child labor" carries a weight that most readers associate with factories, mines, and fields, with small bodies doing dangerous physical work in places far removed from the classroom. Placing that phrase next to artificial intelligence and schools feels, at first, like a provocation. But the argument the author builds is more careful than the title might suggest, and by the end of the book, the connection feels less like a rhetorical move and more like a genuine analytical claim that deserves serious engagement. The book argues that when schools adopt AI-driven platforms, children are not simply learning with new tools. They are producing something, specifically data, and that production has real economic value that flows to private companies while the children themselves receive nothing in return. This, the author contends, is a new form of child labor, one that is compulsory, unpaid, largely invisible, and dressed up in the language of innovation and personalization