Answers to Questions from People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Should Radically Change Education

I'm skeptical.

The flood of hot takes on artificial intelligence in education continues. I find most of it uninformed and irresponsible. The school year is starting and it seems like a fun exercise to write up my answers to common questions I’ve seen on the internet about AI in education. I might hear these from students, families, administrators, or other teachers this year, and if I do I’ll have my answers ready.

Q: Why not just let students use AI in school? They'll be able to use it in their jobs and in the real world, that's what we're preparing them for!
A: You're mistaking "what a job is like" for "the best way to prepare for a job." Students will have a calculator that can do 2 + 2 for them, but it's still useful to know how to add things so they can catch mistakes and not rely on computers for everything. It's still helpful to understand fractions so they know that the one-third pound burger is smaller than the double quarter pounder without having to ask their AI. We've had spell checkers for decades, yet knowing how to spell is important to avoid silly mistakes like their/there and read/reed. There’s actually a name for this, the “Google effect.” When you train people to outsource their thinking to a search engine or some other technology, you train them not to remember things or think for themselves.

Q: Why would you teach any skill that AI can do? We need to train students for the future, not the past!
A: I understand that's a catchy thing to say, but if you think it through you'll realize it's a bit silly. We shouldn't teach any skill an AI can do? Ever? So we shouldn't teach kids to multiply? We should cut writing from the curriculum? Just because AI can do some things doesn't mean they are useless for students. Should we make some changes to the curriculum? Absolutely. I'm happy we no longer teach students how to use slide rules to find logarithms. We should make similar changes to our current curriculum. But we should change through a careful, considered process. Which skills are important even with our current technology, and which ones are not? I don't think every teacher should just willy-nilly start cutting topics. If you want to pay me to do some research on the topics that we can safely cut, it sounds like a cool project!

Q: But what's the point of school anymore? With AI students can just cheat on everything.
A: Cheating has always existed. CliffsNotes was founded in 1958. PhotoMath was released in 2014. You could always pay your cousin to write that essay for you. I agree that cheating is much easier today for a wider variety of assignments. The best solution we have is simple: do more in class. If you tell a student to go home and write an entire essay then sure, that's an invitation to cheat. If you work collaboratively on the essay in class and maybe finish a paragraph for homework, it creates an incentive to actually write. In the same way, if I assign a few practice problems and we work on them for the last few minutes of class I'm setting students up for success rather than inviting them to cheat. It will never be perfect. Teachers will have to prioritize, assign a bit less work, and focus on quality over quantity, but that's fine.

Q: What we really need to be teaching now is critical thinking and problem solving.
A: There's no lesson plan that teaches critical thinking. Students need something to think about. If you don't know anything about a subject you can't think critically about it. Here's a good summary of the research; no one has ever found evidence that you can "teach critical thinking" as a general skill that students can apply anywhere. Critical thinking is specific to the context. There's lots of evidence of world-class experts thinking critically in their area of expertise, but struggling to do so when we change the context a little bit. You are probably great at thinking critically in some contexts, but you are struggling to do so right now in this conversation about education. Our goal is to teach students the knowledge they need to think critically in our subjects, practice that critical thinking in as many contexts as possible, and hope students can apply that thinking when they need it in the future.

Q: Shouldn't we at least be teaching students how to use AI? Knowing how to use it is becoming an essential skill!
A: Maybe. I'm a bit skeptical. I've started thinking about what a few lessons on AI might look like. I could say "here, do all this stuff with AI, isn't that cool?" but that isn't really teaching someone how to use it. I'd like to teach a lesson on hallucinations and a lesson on prompt engineering. I'm not sure what other lessons look like, though if someone wants to pay me to develop a short AI curriculum that sounds fun! Here's my skepticism. Imagine it's 1990 and people are saying, "the internet is changing education forever, we need to teach students about it!" If schools went all-in teaching students internet skills in 1990, most of those skills would be useless within a few years. Technology changes rapidly! Whatever I teach students about AI today might be useless next year. I think this is a good time to slow down and think carefully about what skills are really useful for students, and not say “hey kids today is another lesson on ChatGPT, go ask it to do some stuff for you.”

Q: But AI is changing everything! We need to adapt, and innovate, and disrupt, because that's what's happening in the world around us!
A: There's a long history of people promising that technology will radically transform education. People said that moving pictures would radically transform education 100 years ago. More recently online learning, flipped classrooms, personalized learning, and many more have promised the same. They've all been disappointments. I'm skeptical. I'll believe it when I see it.

Q: But AI can be every student's personal tutor. We know that tutoring works, teachers are standing in the way of a transformative technology.
A: The most important thing that both teachers and tutors do is motivate students. You're right that some companies are rapidly developing AI tutors that are pretty decent at explaining concepts and answering questions. What those AI tutors aren't good at is motivating students to care about the concept, or want to ask a question. The human relationship is still essential for most students. Can some motivated students teach themselves more with the assistance of AI? Sure, but motivated students have always been able to teach themselves a lot by reading and exploring a topic on their own.

Q: Ok but AI is getting better so quickly, even if it hasn't transformed education yet it will any day now!
A: That's nice. Give me a call when that happens. In the meantime I need to get teaching.

Q: But you're a Luddite! You mean you're not changing anything about how you're teaching in response to AI?
A: I'm not changing nothing. AI has reinforced my belief that giving homework is an invitation to cheat for too many students, so I'm going to continue prioritizing time in class for students to work on assignments where I can help and create an incentive not to cheat. I'm cautiously thinking about what a few lessons would look like teaching students about our current AI technologies and how to use them effectively. I'm interested in thinking more about topics that we can cut from the broader curriculum in our current technological era but not making any sudden changes. And I'll keep an eye out for any ways that AI can help me as a teacher with some of the administrative tasks that consume my time and energy when I'd rather be thinking about teaching. But sure, I’m not changing much. I don’t think we should. There’s a lot of hype around AI, which means there’s a lot of risk in chasing the hype and finding we wasted time on a flash in the pan. AI might change everything, and schools will need to adapt, but the best way to do so is slowly and carefully.