A.I. Has No Business in the Classroom
It is time to be brutally honest about AI in education, especially now that the race is on among tech companies to secure lucrative relationships with schools. As indicated by a recent New York Times article, educational AI is shaping up to be big business. Powerful forces are plowing full steam ahead to implement AI into the earliest stages of learning in a woefully uncritical way. One wonders if anyone has consulted those who should know best about the effects of AI on the minds of our students: the teachers.
The commonly held belief that AI is a critical tool for enhancing and expanding student efforts proves facile and misleading, as it fails to resonate with teachers, particularly in the humanities. Conditioning students to consult artificial sources of information gathering and analysis is antithetical to training them to follow the questions generated by actual experience and attempt to square their suppositions with reality. Far from offering support in education, the truth is that AI has destroyed any semblance of academic integrity, shaken students' confidence in their own intellectual abilities, and hindered their creativity and imagination.
These concerns reflect much more than the perennial complaints of educators about troubling trends among the current student population. In fact, teachers are witnessing an entirely new crisis in education, one with far-reaching effects that threaten to compromise one of the very things that make human beings, well, human. The reality is that, slowly and quietly, AI is simultaneously supplanting and corroding the distinctive capacities of the human being: to read and to think about what one reads; to express ideas in writing and the arts; and to cultivate fruitful relationships that pursue such activities as a community.
If such a claim seems overly dramatic, the next time you pose a question to Google and a short AI overview appears, ask yourself how motivated you are to continue your search for a satisfying response. Does the quick and seemingly authoritative AI synopsis dampen your spirit of inquiry even a little bit? Consider what it does to a young and impressionable mind, eager for a ready-made answer. Or how about the way AI impinges on the process of writing? When a spelling correction pops up, many people are grateful for the catch. But when Google or Grammarly attempt to complete authors’ thoughts in the very act of composition, mature writers think with annoyance, “How do you know what I have in mind?” whereas budding ones jump at the suggestion, assuming they could do no better. AI both erodes confidence and undercuts human intelligence at work.
AI deals a serious blow to genuine intellectual curiosity, which is already beleaguered by our society’s grade-driven and instrumental view of education. What is more, it short-circuits discursive reasoning. The potential for a classroom to be vibrant and exciting rests on it being an environment where students feel free to ask questions, to admit perplexity, and to work towards the truth together as a community of learners.
Students, by definition, need to cultivate habits of mind. Reliance on AI in education not only results in a missed opportunity to learn something for oneself, but it also stunts the growth necessary for building the foundations of a life of learning. If shutting down the laptops, writing in bluebooks, and reading and discussing actual texts with one’s peers merely puts off the inevitable use of AI in young people’s eventual workaday lives, then so be it. At least, this new generation of students will have a chance to develop their minds and grasp the critical difference between human wisdom and artificially generated information.
