A Band-Aid at best

Today, you can hear two wildly different stories of how artificial intelligence is transforming education.

On one telling, AI stands poised to unlock new doors for both teachers and students, helping to accelerate research, remove tedium from learning and bias from grading, and match every student up with a personalized AI tutor that can adapt to their pace and learning style. School districts across America are experimenting with mass deployment of AI in the classroom, with Miami-Dade County’s efforts recently featured in an enthusiastic New York Times story, “How Miami Schools are Leading 100,000 Students into the A.I. Future.” Colleges and universities have launched task forces on how they will use AI to transform their programs. And most recently, even the federal government got in on the action, with a White House’s executive order—named “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for America’s Youth”—calling for aggressive deployment of AI tools into K-12 classrooms.

The other tale is one of woe and bewilderment. A recent feature in New York Magazine reported that “Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair” as a majority of college students routinely used generative AI to produce their assignments. The Chronicle of Higher Education shared stories from one professor that “A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due,” and students admonished not to use AI complained that he was “interfering with their ‘learning styles.’” Friends of mine even at conservative Christian colleges describe confronting students over AI-generated essays and encountering puzzlement: “Wait, what’s wrong with that?”

Meanwhile, harried, cynical, or just plain overworked teachers are resorting to AI as well, whether to create prompts or fill out modules on learning management systems (a notoriously tedious task), or even to grade assignments. Indeed, some are ready to suggest that this last is a good thing, since “Traditional grading … can be influenced by personal preferences, moods, and unconscious prejudices.” As the Intelligencer observes, we are fast approaching a world where “the entire academic exercise [is reduced] to a conversation between two robots—or maybe even just one.”

There is an asymmetry, however, between these two stories. The AI boosters seem long on enthusiasm and cliches but short on details: “A.I. is just another tool in the arsenal of education,” a Miami superintendent vacuously declares. “AI applications in education can foster interactive collaboration and facilitate content creation and curation for students and teachers alike,” enthuses the University of Iowa. K-12 AI education is “fostering a culture of innovation and critical thinking that will solidify our Nation’s leadership in the AI-driven future,” the White House echoes. One can’t help but wonder whether ChatGPT wrote these sentences.

Meanwhile, the reports from the front lines of education are concrete and thoroughly predictable. Put a bunch of conflict-averse risk-managing administrators, teachers trained to coddle and “empower,” and students whose brains have been melted by years of Instagram reels together, tell the students their future economic success depends on their grades, and hand them a chatbot that will write the assignment for them. What exactly do you think will happen? How many do you think will resist the temptation? And what do you think the results will be for genuine learning? Just in case we didn’t have the testimonies of teachers and thousands of years of experience with human nature to go by, we now have expert academic researchers reporting back that, according to their rigorous studies, AI use is linked to “metacognitive laziness” and “a deterioration in critical thinking skills.”

The difficulty isn’t that we can’t imagine ways in which AI could help education, at least as currently practiced. In many institutions, teachers and professors spend a significant proportion of their time filling out forms and reports, rather than actually teaching. Or else they struggle to calibrate their lectures to a large room full of students of vastly different abilities—inevitably, they will over-explain for some and under-explain for others. With student literacy declining, they feel forced to assign mediocre books or short excerpts rather than exposing students to the classics. AI could, in theory, help with each of these: It could automate the bureaucratic side of education, it could provide personalized “lectures” for students who need extra time to grasp the concepts, and it could provide a kind of live commentary or glossary on more difficult texts so that students can start reading Shakespeare again.

But each of these represents AI as a kind of Band-Aid, treating the symptoms of an already deformed educational system. Most of our educators long since stopped understanding what education was for—which is to say, forming a human person in skill and virtue, of leading them out of dependency and into independent agency. We stopped educating children as humans and started training them as productivity-maximizing tool-users instead. Is it any wonder, then, that they’ve responded by embracing the greatest productivity-maximizing tool of all?