Josh Durey is an educator with extensive classroom and leadership experience. He left institutional teaching to build a curriculum engine that automates lesson creation, and is the author of the forthcoming Still Human: What We Lose When the System Replaces the Teacher—a narrative nonfiction investigation into what happens when the teacher is engineered out of the classroom.
He designed RAILS, the evaluation instrument behind the book’s original research, and lives in Seoul with his wife and two daughters.
I spent twenty years in international classrooms across four countries. I ran an upper-elementary homeroom at Korea International School for five years and finished my institutional career as a vice principal in Seoul. I left because the VP role required me to enforce systems I’d watched fail my own students, and eventually my own children, and I couldn’t do it anymore.
After I left, I built. I wrote a curriculum engine that generates scripted lessons, slideshows, assessments, and teaching guides from a set of standards and a scope sequence. A teacher can literally read the script and follow the activities as written. I standardized content delivery so that an inexperienced teacher using my materials would teach a better lesson than she would have planned on her own.
If I’m honest about how much of the job that covers, I’d say about fifty percent. The other fifty percent is everything the script can’t hold. The fourth grader whose mother taught him the wrong definition of a reading concept for three years. The kid testing through the roof who eats lunch alone every day. The moment a student decides you’re worth trusting, not because you taught him the skill on the assessment, but because you answered his questions about something else honestly enough that he gave you the benefit of the doubt. None of that is in the slides. And I don’t know how to put it there.
Someone else looked at the same job and saw the same opportunity. But where I automated half and held the line on the other half, they automated the whole thing. The teacher removed. The tool kept. A private school model endorsed by the White House and rejected by seven state charter boards. And the AI at the center of the instruction trained on thirty years of reading methods the science proved wrong.
Still Human started as research into a gap that shouldn’t exist: no independent evaluation standard for AI-generated reading instruction. Then I followed the money. The research became an investigation. The investigation became a book. The person writing it is not watching the system from the outside. I built half of it myself. I know exactly what it captures and exactly what it cannot.
I built a curriculum engine that automates lesson creation. Scripted slides, assessments, teaching guides, all generated from standards. If I’m honest about how much of the job it captures, I’d say about fifty percent. The other fifty percent is everything this book is about. No other critic of AI in education has built the system they’re critiquing.
The fifty percent that can’t be automated is the part I spent my career doing. Four countries, thousands of reading lessons, the full arc from classroom teacher to VP. I retrained from balanced literacy to structured literacy on the evidence. I know what debunked practice looks like in AI output because I used to teach it myself.
Reading is the testable front of the argument. RAILS is the first purpose-built evaluation instrument for scoring AI-generated literacy content against the Science of Reading. Thirteen indicators, five strands, 28 peer-reviewed citations. The findings are replicable: the pipeline is automated, and anyone with API keys can run the same study.
Still Human is in draft. The full investigation, sample writing, and research apparatus are on this site.
Get in touch →Background briefings on RAILS, Alpha School, and Amira available. Original data and sourcing provided.
Press inquiry →Questions, corrections, tips, or educators who need a sounding board on AI in the classroom.
Send a message →Prefer plain email? josh@stillhumanacademy.com