2023 in Education: the greatest year that never was.

Imagine that you are an Uber driver and you are gifted a brand new, top of the line, self-driving car, with every imaginable comfort feature and accessory, which you can use maintenance-free indefinitely. But you still opt to drive people around in your old, battered, unreliable and uncomfortable car because… you are used to it and it makes you feel good about your driving abilities in being able to make the most of your derelict vehicle.

Not only that: your bosses at Uber are aware of this situation and they not only do nothing about it, they actually encourage you to hold on to your venerable set of wheels, despite knowing that you could be far more productive and better serve your passengers if you switched over to the latest generation model. The reason? They don′t really know how to manage a fleet of brand new, state of the art cars, and they can′t be bothered to learn how to do it, lest they might be rendered irrelevant.

This absurd scenario is akin to what happened in 2023 with AI in Education. Despite being given the gift of a lifetime, a dream come true, a free to use tool that can make our teaching and learning several orders of magnitude more engaging, fun, better, connected with real life, a blank check for lifelong learning, we educators have mutually opted for burying our head in the sand and largely kept schools blissfully unaltered.

If anything, following a perennial pattern towards negative narratives in education, our focus was on “academic integrity”, yet another fancy catchphrase – another of our inveterate habits – that simply denotes our fear of students using these tools to cheat on assignments and evaluations.

As the world collectively held its breath, in awe at the amazing features of generative AI applications, and scrambled to try to make sense of them productively, schools remained impervious to the most impactful technological development in history, with few exceptions, continuing with business as usual.

I can attest to this: I have been fortunate this year to travel all over the world and meet with practitioners from a wide range of schools and school systems, and at the time of this writing – mid-December 2023 – a substantial number of educators have not even tried any of these tools or use them sparsely at best. If I had to estimate percentages, I would say that only 30% use ChatGPT and other AI tools on a daily basis, and less than 10% have subscribed to the paid version. The brand new car in our story has just a few miles in its odometer.

This is a mere snapshot of what ChatGPT and an ever-growing family of generative AI applications can do for us:

• Create lesson plans to any level of detail desired.
• Develop interdisciplinary problems to any level of complexity.
• Create rubrics, again, completely customized.
• Develop assessment instruments with answer keys.
• Create practice problems given a topic or sample exercise.
• Simulate data.
• Adapt any text or classroom materials for students with learning difficulties or special needs.
• Create personalized reading lists.
• Act as an infinitely patient and resilient personalized tutor.
• Converse and correct in any foreign language adapted to the user′s level of proficiency.
• Respond as historical or current characters, allowing students to interact with them with a great level of realism.
• Develop case studies, hypothetical scenarios, conflicts.
• Create stories for any theme or topic, illustrating them if needed.
• Act as a top-level professional writing editor.
• Find classroom resources and research materials.
• Connect any problem or topic with real life situations.
• Summarize and rewrite any text to unlimited levels of personalization.
• Analyze text, spreadsheet data, reports, anything that can be quantified.
• Interpret and reproduce diagrams and photographs
• Provide personalized feedback for student work based on a rubric that the tools themselves can draw up.
• Grade papers and other assessment instruments.
• Create images, presentations, videos, music.

This list only scratches the surface of the potential of generative AI applications, but it suffices to illustrate what most educators are missing out on. AI in education is not about replacing or dehumanizing us, quite the opposite, its application can greatly empower the teacher in creating a more engaging and personalized learning environment.

Why are we not using these tools that can self-evidently enhance our teaching and learning and even make our professional life a lot easier? Why is it that policymakers, district leaders, principals, curriculum designers are not running like crazy to incorporate AI into education? Why, despite even acknowledging that AI might be the ultimate catalyst for a new model of education, do we remain obstinately ensconced in our tried and tested but largely outdated pedagogical practices?

Answering these questions would entail a deep and long overdue analysis of the group psyche of the teaching profession, as well as a profound reassessment of the toxic power structures still prevailing in education at large, but that exceeds the scope of this article.

However, at the root of the cause is one of the often most overlooked barriers to progress: that the changes in the knowledge paradigm, accentuated by AI, require not just a change in our roles, but to redefine our sense of purpose. ChatGPT and generative AI applications are the ultimate equalizer, allowing students and general users to access unlimited information ubiquitously, depriving the learned of their hitherto unassailable power conferred by their knowledge.

Francis Bacon′s famous quote, “Knowledge is power”, has now been reversed: the power goes to the individual, in this case, respectively, students, teachers and general users. And this results in what George Bernard Shaw called “the conspiracy against the laity”, a kind of spontaneous confabulation of those in power to combat any novelty that dilutes that power. This explains why so many experts and educational gurus are warning us against potential apocalyptic scenarios rather than encouraging educators to explore and use generative AI, in what are very prominent antibodies against the laypeople being able, through AI, to have unrestricted personalized access to all accumulated human knowledge.

We fool ourselves if we think that the key to a successful application to AI in education that can truly revolutionize learning is a technical problem that can be solved through professional development. Professional learning is always a step in the right direction, but the only way forward, from Ministers of Education to district leaders, principals, teachers and teaching assistants, is to renew our vocational call and attempt to derive meaning not from the self-invested power that is intrinsic to most education roles, but rather from reconnecting with our love of learning.

Regardless of potential developments, risks, possible plagiarism, misuse, ethical concerns and a myriad of other issues that need to be addressed as we implement AI in schools, generative AI is the most significant development in history to improve our ability to learn and our access to knowledge. And that is all that should matter for us to embrace it wholeheartedly. Education is not about how we can still drive our old clunkers; it is about taking our students places and getting them excited, for life, about the thrill of exploration.