Tech at Milton Over the Years
By HT Xue ‘26, for History Club
Historian Howard Zinn famously said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” This issue of The Milton Paper chronicles the Milton community’s ongoing quest to find its place in a world adapting to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but the proverbial train of technological advancement has been moving since long before the release of ChatGPT in 2022. This article draws from an interview with long-time History Faculty Member and Upper School Instructional Technologist Mr. Joshua Furst to recount the history of Milton’s adaptation to computer technologies since 2010, and to contextualize our current discourse on AI.
Furst arrived at Milton in 2010, three years after the invention of the iPhone and twenty-one years after the invention of the World Wide Web. By this point, cellphones had become commonplace among teenagers, but social media had yet to develop beyond computer-based platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Milton was yet to instate a “Bring Your Own Device” policy, meaning the two computer labs–located in what are today Mr. Matthew Petherick and Mr. Gregg Deehan’s classrooms–saw heavy usage by Milton students seeking internet access during the school day. The most prominent technological frontier Milton was facing inside the classroom lay in the deployal of “smart boards”–interactive projector screens that, while ubiquitous today, were only in the “starting stages” of usage at Milton in 2010, per Furst.
Throughout the 2010s, with the popularization of cloud work platforms like Google Drive among educators to organize workflow, computer access became essential for individual students. Thus, Milton officially instated a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policy, in which students are required to bring electronic devices to school, in 2016. Though Milton community members today largely take the BYOD principle for granted, some, like Furst, were concerned with the policy “from an equity standpoint” when it was implemented in 2016. “We wondered,” said Furst, “if there was enough space within our financial aid to ensure that everyone has financial access to a device.”
Given this history, it seems clear that controversial questions about technological adaptation are far from new to the Academy. Yet, these questions feel more momentous today than ever before. Specifically, Milton faces technological uncertainty from two main axes in the mid-to-late 2020s.
First: how will we define the role of the smartphone within our community? As Furst pointed out, “Milton prides itself on the community aspect within the classroom.” Yet, a wealth of research has shown that the presence of phones within the classroom reduces this sense of communal exchange in a multiplicity of ways. This detrimental effect is why Furst recounted that “in [his] experience, schools that have restricted phone use have vastly seen positive outcomes.” While concerns over student agency, logistics, and student safety have stifled any push for a phone ban at Milton, the Massachusetts State Senate passed a bill just this past summer mandating public schools in the state to enforce general phone bans starting in the 2026-27 school year. With this shifting political atmosphere, perhaps Milton will finally have to wholeheartedly reckon with cellphone usage on a policy level.
Second (and the elephant in the room): how will Milton respond to the rise of AI in education? Regardless of what Milton community members think of AI tools, their rapid adoption by tech giants like Microsoft and Google makes seemingly inevitable a world in which AI assistance is available to students in every field. Milton consequently must create an institution-wide framework on AI. This framework will consider several questions: what general skills does Milton want its students to leave with? How does AI threaten these skills? How might it help us learn them? How can we use AI in a way that enhances Milton’s place in the broader private school market?
These ongoing discussions about AI bring us back into the core questions the articles in this Paper seek to answer. AI adaptation is a mammoth task. History, however, teaches us that Milton–and the world–have faced perhaps equally as paradigm-shifting technological changes in the past, from the invention of the World Wide Web to the proliferation of the cellphone. In the knowledge that we have done this before, we can perhaps find some comfort.