AI in the Classroom Is Our Most Senseless Education Experiment Yet
AI in the Classroom Is Our Most Senseless Education Experiment Yet
We know that childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood are pivotal times for human development. It should go without saying that, when it comes to education, we need to get the basics right and, maybe even more importantly, avoid getting big things wrong. That’s a daunting charge, but we’re not flying blind. Humans have literally thousands of years of experience in teaching and learning, and brain science has made astonishing gains in recent decades. We know a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. If ever there’s a place for the tried and true — and a place needing protection from the risky — it’s the classroom.
But for whatever reason, we too often treat schools like labs and students like test subjects. Dodgy ideas are brought to life, and kids often pay the price. In the 1970s, schools knocked down walls to build “open classrooms,” which turned out to be noisy and chaotic. Professors invented “whole language” reading instruction, pooh-poohing phonics and longstanding teaching techniques, and harmed countless students’ learning in the process. We filled classrooms with iPads and Chromebooks and allowed students to have constant access to their phones, and now we wonder why kids are addicted to screens. Then there are the political vogues: When the 1619 Project was hot, we invited its curriculum into schools; as trans issues dominated our politics, we allowed schools to hide students’ social transitioning from their parents. And most infamously, we closed schools during the Covid pandemic — in many places, for over a year — and told ourselves that a few hours of online learning was a fine substitute.
But all of these mistakes are likely to pale in comparison to the future costs of today’s senseless experiment with AI.
Students in K–12 schools and higher education are now outsourcing themost important parts of learning to chatbots and similar programs. Instead of reading, students have AI summarize books and articles for them. Instead of brainstorming ideas for projects and reports, they use AI to conjure up ideas. Instead of drafting, editing, rewriting, and reediting, they have AI produce and then improve their papers. Somehow, we’ve suddenly forgotten arguably the most crucial aspect of schools’ academic mission: having students do hard things.
Yes, of course, AI can finish many tasks faster than a human. But that’s precisely why we should not allow AI in the classroom. Learning is seldom about swiftly generating a final product. It’s about the slow, arduous work necessary for getting to a final product. From a great teacher’s perspective, what a student wrote in her final paper is less important than the weeks of researching relevant sources, assembling evidence, and outlining an argument. That great teacher doesn’t want a student to just write the correct answers on the exam; he wants the student to spend hours and hours reading texts closely, figuring out why that formula works, or trying different approaches until landing on the right method.
Very few adults will ever be suddenly asked by a boss to compare and contrast Antigone and Oedipus Rex. Or calculate a derivative or standard deviation. Or explain how Einstein’s understanding of gravity differed from Newton’s. Or choose between the Federalists’ and Anti-Federalists’ takes on the size of republics. But adults do need to assess competing claims. They need the studiousness, the grit, to work through thorny problems. They need to understand budgets and interest rates. They need to wrestle with moral dilemmas and apply old lessons to novel challenges. Schooling builds the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for succeeding as a citizen, neighbor, employee, spouse, and parent. If you want to debilitate a generation, take away all of their practice at developing that knowledge and those skills and dispositions. And if you want to debilitate them while having society believe you’re doing us all a favor, tell them you are providing “innovative” tech tools that enable “efficiency” and “progress.”
Few doubt that AI could advance medicine or spur scientific discoveries. It might dramatically improve city planning and industrial logistics. It could eventually be seen as an absolute godsend in some fields. In fact, this astonishing potential is exactly what’s blinding us to its educational risks. That is, AI could publicly work wonders in the professional world while silently undermining schooling. The telescope revolutionized our understanding of space, but it didn’t jeopardize students’ learning of physics. The microscope revolutionized our understanding of cells and germs, but it didn’t jeopardize students’ learning of chemistry or biology. AI, as currently used, does jeopardize students’ capacity to read, write, calculate, study, and create.
The costs of AI are already being confirmed. Research is showing that habitual use of AI decreases brain activity and can make students dependent. Teachers and professors see its harmful effects on student research and writing, and the value proposition of education. Students themselves express misgivings about the effects AI has on their education — they know it’s hurting their critical thinking skills.
We should concede that AI is a technical marvel while recognizing its enormous limitations. It cannot end the war in Iran or develop an immigration policy that makes everyone happy. It cannot fix the decline in marriage or fertility. It can’t adjudicate the moral claims underlying abortion, euthanasia, or capital punishment. It can’t tell us whether liberty or order should take precedence when addressing prostitution, drug use, and gambling. It can’t make you more honest, judicious, compassionate, or just. We need informed, skilled, reasoning, virtuous people to do all of this, and we only get such people through an educational system that makes them do the hard work of acquiring information, skills, reason, and virtue.
We look at young adults today with their diminished attention spans, elevated anxiety, and decreased capacity to build in-person relationshipsand wonder how in the world we allowed screens to dominate their young lives over the last decade. In another ten years, we’ll look at young adults’ cratered ability to read, write, brainstorm, compare and contrast, weigh evidence, reason morally, and tackle complicated problems and wonder how in the world we allowed AI to do their thinking for them.
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