The Great Education Cop-Out: How We're Failing the AI Generation
Remember when ChatGPT hit the scene and everyone lost their minds? “Education will never be the same!” they cried. “AI will revolutionize learning!” they proclaimed, VC’s rushed in with their checkbooks in hand, and educators proclaimed the end of independent thinking. For good or for bad, the feeling was that AI was going to fundamentally change education as we know it. Fast forward 18 months and what does the latest State of AI in Education reports say?
The end of this blog has links to endless such reports by very reputable organizations, far more than that exists for any other industry. As you read through it, you will find use cases for saving teachers’ time in lesson preparation, students using AI tools for research, more data to drive personalized learning, and the percentage of AI tool adoption on the rise. What you will not find, are the whispers of fundamental change, a full-on education revolution as a result of AI, and the palpable excitement of what could be. ?So instead of recapping those adoption stats and listing the use cases that just lead to the same but faster, I’ve written what is MISSING from these reports, how our lack of fundamental change in education is failing the AI Generation.
The Illusion of Progress
All the AI in Education uses cases are the same stuff that’s been around EdTech for a decade, NOTHING is new.
If you haven’t been in EdTech for a decade, you will view the use cases like personalized learning, adaptive learning, AI tutoring, assessment generation, and lesson plan generation with some interest. But these use cases are not new, the only difference that Generative AI brings is that some of these solutions can now be done faster, cheaper, and easier. That’s an incremental improvement to use cases we’ve pursued for a decade without significant results. It’s a nice long list of use cases, but their previous lack of impact wasn’t because of speed, cost or difficulty. The improvement in efficiencies of the end solutions will only provide incremental impact.
The Knowledge Paradox
Our education system focuses on transmitting knowledge in a world where any knowledge is just one click away.
The fundamental shift that education hasn’t grappled with yet is that knowledge is no longer difficult to access and nor is it still a barrier to entry. The internet, mobile devices, and now generative AI has increasingly put all knowledge one click away for the entire population. It’s why education feels irrelevant, because it’s still trying to get you to memorize, regurgitate, and embed information into our brains for easy access when ChatGPT can just answer it. But if the education system doesn’t focus on teaching knowledge, then what?!
Education has to fundamentally shift to focus on skills: thinking, reasoning, creativity, judgement, emotional management, health management, relationship management, and communication. The list goes on and on, and you feel it resonate with you as I say it. It’s because what we need is to learn to deal with a world of too much information and knowing how to best use it vs being able to repeat it.
What we are failing to do is restating the education system goals to match the realities of the world we’re in.This education system was designed to create knowledge workers for the Industrial Age, but has yet to make the transition for what’s needed for the Information Age.
The Cheating Fallacy
We call it cheating as an easy way out so we don’t have to change the way we teach and assess.
The most common concern and push back from educators for using AI in classrooms is the word “cheating.” Most of explanations around what constitutes “cheating” is usually “it’s not your own work”, or “you can’t just get the answers, that’ll stop your thinking and learning.” The fallacy of “it’s not your own work” is that most of us write based on what we’ve read, just like the AI does. My best work starts with reading what others write, thinking through them, analyzing them, and restating my perspective on it. There’s not a single idea that hasn’t been said by someone somewhere before. An unethical label is just easy out to ignore the complexity being introduced. What we don’t say is that it was easier to grade before AI can help with your writing. Spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and research footnotes make an easy rubric to grade against. If no one makes those mistakes, it’s much harder to grade based upon logic, creativity, and strength of narrative? So we take the easy way out, call it cheating so we don’t keep push more difficulties on our maxed out teachers.
If you’ve ever watched kids interact with AI for an extended period of time you’ll see them using AI in creative ways you’ve never thought of. A technology that will answer any question, follow any instruction regardless of how often or how silly? They spend more time than I’ve ever seen dueling wits with it, trying to trick it, trying to make it dumb, trying to make it funny. When kids use AI, they don’t get judged, they just get answers. The answers does nothing to stop them from asking more questions, from thinking, from challenging, and from learning. Anyone who remembers the endless questions from kids on long drives will agree with me: answers have never stopped kids from asking more questions. The excuse that an AI that answers questions makes kids not think is just that, an excuse.
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Redefining the Teacher’s Role
Teachers should no longer be above the students, but next to them.
Our current expectations of teachers is that they have the answers, they have the wisdom, and they’re there to pour what they know into the kids. Wow, high bar for the salary huh? And now you put a free AI next to the student that knows everything… Seems like the opposite of “being setup for success” for either the teachers or the students. But this was the right role in a system designed to disseminate knowledge. If that’s no longer the case, the teacher’s role has to change as well. Instead, they should be sherpas, guides that explore and learn together with the students. They have more experience: they know how to find better routes; they can give advice, and help with preparations. Then they go on the learning journey together with the students, pointing out things that shouldn’t be missed along the way. Each journey they take is a little different because the students make them different. Doesn’t that make you both more willing to teach and to learn?
The AI Revolution Mirage
We cannot put the burden of change on teachers and students.
We've been sold a shimmering vision of AI transforming education, but it's just a mirage in the desert of our outdated system. Peek behind the curtain of AI use cases, and what do you find? Teachers with fancier tools. Students with shinier apps. Administrators drowning in more data. But the gears of the educational machine? Still grinding away, same as ever.
We're expecting teachers and students to be the vanguards of change, but they're just cogs in a system that refuses to evolve. It's like giving a race car to someone stuck in rush hour traffic – all that power, zero progress. The real puppet masters – controlling salaries, resources, and rewards – they're not budging. We're not revolutionizing education; we're just automating mediocrity.
For AI to truly revolutionize education, we need to flip the script. Forget top-down mandates. We need a bottom-up approach that taps into students' intrinsic curiosity. AI should be fostering skills that students want to explore, not just making it easier to cram for standardized tests.
Yes, AI makes personalized learning more accessible. But without systemic change, it's just a sophisticated toy in an outdated playpen. The AI revolution in education isn't a failure because the technology isn't ready – it's a mirage because it’s not the technology that will bring about the change. Until dismantle and rebuild the very foundations of our educational system to match the current world that AI exists in, the education revolution will remain nothing more than a tantalizing illusion. Only education can reset itself, no amount of AI, technology, and tools will ever be the driver of an education revolution, only a supporter.
State of AI in Education Industry Reports:
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Helping SMB's and Enterprise companies to create a robust and repetitive AI governance framework through the Holistic AI platform
3 个月Great article to read. The last bullet point in your statement above is a prime reason AI Governance platforms like HolisticAI exist. To ensure proper compliance and reducing the inherent risk associated with certain AI tools and use cases. I thought this was a great read.
Author of "Start Right: The Science of Good Beginnings" (coming 2025) | Executive Director, Learnology Labs | Principal Consultant, Choice-Filled Lives (CLN) | Learning Scientist | EdTech Innovator | Executive Leader
3 个月Thanks for this Yuying. I think something else that we are not talking about (or talking enough about) is the kind of infrastructure needed to develiver on the promise of Ai in Ed. Things like high-quality accessible knowledge models for all the disciplines (and inter disciplinary), creative and social emotional skills, etc., as well as the tools and infrastructure necessary to power interoperability and such. I've been writing about the knowledge modeling need over at Learnology Labs (published here on LinkedIn), but I'd like to know if others are working on this, and the interoperability issues. Basically, what is the infrastructure needed to deliver the new world of education, ai-driven or otherwise?
Co-Founder MITS Capital ????????????| Board Director?? | UN SDG #1 ??
3 个月As usual, Yuying Chen-Wynn nails it.