Approaching the Role of AI in Education

Employers want graduates who are comfortable using AI tools, so it only makes sense to weave AI into schooling as much as possible. Why would you spend a lot of time teaching facts and skills that students won’t ever need in their jobs? If AI can write for them at work, they may as well learn to use AI to write for them at school.

Verdict: OVERREACTION. For starters, it’s good to recall that education is more than workforce preparation. (Schools are also tasked with developing talents, cultivating critical faculties, and preparing students for citizenship.) But even setting that aside, the assumption is dubious. It hearkens back to the time many advocates and educators seized on the introduction of the handheld calculator to insist that teaching computation was now an unnecessary waste of time.

That was, of course, nuts. It turns out that students who haven’t developed math automaticity are going to have trouble spotting errors or making sense of mortgage payments or credit card offers, no matter what tools they use. Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University, has aptly noted that “Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health.” Students build capacity through cognitive strain. Developing a thesis, building an argument, assembling evidence, anticipating reader response, and editing text is how we build the muscles of analysis and communication.

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