We need to make sure “AI does not end up actually dumbing down the students”
My interview on Fox News Digital: “It may benefit particularly the weaker performing students, but that’s a plus and a minus. It benefits them in terms of end product. It doesn’t necessarily benefit them in terms of figuring things out on their own.”
I was interviewed this week by Fox News digital for an article about students suing their school systems for failing to provide an education and allowing them to graduate high school without basic reading and math skills. While most of the interview concerned core problems in education, there was a part where I was able to talk about Artificial Intelligence in education and the promise/threat it posed.
The article did quite well, staying on the home page for a while and generating over 4000 comments.
Illiterate high school graduates suing school districts as Ivy League professor warns of ‘deeper problem’ [archive]:
Two high school graduates who say they can’t read or write are suing their respective public school systems, arguing they were not given the free public education to which they are entitled.
Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson, director of the Securities Law Clinic, told Fox News Digital the lawsuits signify a “much deeper problem” with the American public school system.
“I think these cases reflect a deeper problem in education. For each of these cases, there are probably tens of thousands of students who never got a proper education — they get pushed along the system,” Jacobson said. “Unfortunately … we’ve created incentives, particularly for public school systems, to just push students along and not to hold them accountable.” ….
Jacobson told Fox News Digital that “in fairness” to teachers and school districts, they are “caught between various forces pushing against each other.”
“On the one hand, there’s oftentimes money tied to performance. And if you fail students, if you don’t advance them, that could affect the funding that the school district gets,” he explained. “There are individual students who have parents who … want them not to fail. And so there’s a lot of pressure there.”The Cornell Law professor added that while he does not see AI going anywhere in the future of education, “we’ve got to be very firm that AI does not end up actually dumbing down the students rather than informing the students, because you can become very dependent on it, and that’s another problem, but it’s one we can’t ignore.”
Additionally, Jacobson said, parents should be more focused on helping their children to read and write.
“Parents would be better focused on helping their students and their children learn, rather than worrying about the next lawsuit,” he said. “I realize that might be a little unrealistic, because we are in a culture of trying to cash in on lawsuits, but I think our energy should be focused on fixing the system and getting students properly treated, as opposed to: how are we going to sue the school district?”
The full video is below, with my comments on AI transcribed (by AI).
(Transcript Excerpt, auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
AI for students is a hot topic in higher education, I can tell you that. And it’s even worked its way into the court system with some lawyers getting in trouble for relying on AI, which generates substantive content, doesn’t just summarize what’s out there, and have cited cases that don’t exist. This is a real problem.
I’m not personally against students using AI, but it really should be the starting point, not the ending point. If it is used as a substitute for actually learning the material and learning how to figure things out, then it’s a huge negative.
But just using the AI that’s built into the Google search engine, I’ve got to tell you, it’s pretty good. But it’s the starting point. It is not the ending point.
I don’t think we should be a society, or an educational programming or approach, that says you have to ignore this technology that is out there. That would be like saying you’re not allowed to use spell check on your word processor.
But we’ve got to be very firm that AI does not end up actually dumbing down the students rather than informing the students. Because you can become very dependent on it, and that’s another problem, but it’s one we can’t ignore. We can’t pretend it’s not there.
We can’t say you can’t use AI because everybody’s going to use it. And you use it even when you don’t know you’re using it. Like on a simple Google search, if you do a simple Google search, the top ranked entry is always the Google AI result. And so it’s unrealistic.
I think we need to figure out ways to allow students to use it. It may benefit particularly the weaker performing students, but that’s a plus and a minus. It benefits them in terms of end product. It doesn’t necessarily benefit them in terms of figuring things out on their own.
One thing that got left on the cutting room floor when the interview was edited was my suggestion that schools have a separeate period each day devoted to classical learning – like writing cursive and doing the basic manual and ‘old fashioned’ methods of learning and research to counter the AI downsides.
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Too late
How much dumber can they get than they already are?
Which was my first thought
AI is all cliches even in deep analysis. Still, the way kids learn language is learning to disassemble and reassemble cliches.
The problem that I have run into is in knowledge base. I recently purchased a book on aspects of the civil war. The book seemed reasonable and balanced, a rare find in that topic. But I saw the b0ok on Amaz0n and a computer had generated criticism of the information. It would lead me to think that the coverage was not in keeping with current historians. When did historical information become the total propaganda of the left, and how do you change it.
Just like no cell phones in the classroom, no AI. Aside from its bias and ability to manipulate, it makes humans less capable to be human, to think, and to know. Good luck!
The rise of this insidious technology, replacing outright plagiarism, has already messed up students.
I am of the considered opinion that the more artificial “intelligence” there is, the less actual, organic if you will, intelligence there is. It is undermining critical thinking, research and creativity. Why bother to spell or learn grammar when AI can clean it up for you?
It my waning days as a teacher, I simply gave oral exams/presentations to offset the decline. Long, handwritten exams, with essays, were effective.
And don’t forget: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). The potential for manipulation of information via AI is enormous.
The problem is that parents have largely abdicated their roles as educators for their children. They rely far too completely on the schools.
I can understand parents not teaching their children various material, such as the sciences or advanced mathematics, but they should be much more involved in the learning to read, write, and comprehend writing.
They should also ask an important question, and discuss the answer: What did you learn in school today?
Until you speak up at a school board meeting and you’re labeled a terrorist and the FBI comes looking for you.
The government schools aren’t bad because they’re poorly implemented. They’re bad because they would be bad even if they were perfectly implemented. They cannot be “reformed” because they are based on a inherently bad idea: that The One Best System can accommodate everyone. That is not consistent with liberty and justice for all.
I disagree a little. While I think the system as constructed is FAR from ideal, it worked just fine for most of the 20th century. It wasn’t until the cultural ‘revolution’ of the 1960s did the public schools slowly start to deteriorate…a deterioration that really steepened in the very early 1990s.
Having said that, I don’t think there’s any easy solution to the academic malaise that has settled over primary and secondary education. 80% of our problems directly relate to the destruction of the nuclear family that began in earnest in the ‘60s.
I agree on the nuclear family, but think a big problem is government fiscal irresponsibility that also started then under LBJ with a “guns and butter” economy. Inflation became a killer and, even in a nuclear family, most mothers eventually could no longer stay home and take good care of the children, including their education, but had to go out and work. Finally, a merit-based society has gone out the window – no accountability anywhere and a participation trophy is just fine. You can’t read, write of do math, it is “Who cares, here is your diploma.”
I remember when calculators were not allowed in school. Now you can’t go to school without one. AI will dumb kids down because it will do their spelling, sentence structure, content, and grammar, and they will never look back. The genie is out of the bottle and I suggest that teachers work with it and teach the kids how to use it properly just like they did with calculators. The number one thing that students should come away with is to question everything they encounter in life.
Devils advocate: I think it would be useful to allow AI as a kind of interactive textbook, but require students to rewrite the content in their own words.
I hated textbooks as a student. Imagine being able to ask a textbook to explains something you don’t understand.
My opinion is ai is the next encyclopedia Britannica, except when I was growing up in the ‘60s, I couldn’t just copy and paste.
The issue will be if critical thinking remains sporadically taught, ai will be the output of non thinkers.
More like Wikipedia. Physical books give yesteryear’s propaganda. The Interweb is an Orewllian wet dream where books exist in an eternal flame and the talking points always reflect the current thing.
My wife started substitute teaching last year k-5. Great flexible job to get her engaged in the community. The school has a number of kids who know Zero english and speak only spanish. (Thanks Joe Biden). I’ve kept both of us brushed up on spanish so she speaks some, but many of the teachers know zero. She tells me many teachers are at a total loss in speaking to these kids.
#1 For all the crap teachers have to learn, are you telling me 4 years of foreign language wasn’t one of them?
#2 There’s a PC at almost every desk and every teacher is packing a phone. While my 20 something niece can travel Vietnam and get by swimmingling with google translate, not one of these teachers can figur out how to use technology that’s been solid for a decade to translate?
#3 Everyone one of these kids knows how to flip through a phone for all the games and crap. But somehow these schools can’t rig up an android device for these kids to use as a translation device until they learn to speak English.
Their only work around is to pair the kids up with some bi-lingual mexican classmate.
Thanks again Joe Biden… We really don’t need to be paying for all of this in the first place, but since you flew in millions of these problems, our kids now have 80% of their teacher’s attention on non-english speaking students.
It’s too late.
The guys I hire cannot even find their way home without their cell phone.
Is there a floor as to how ‘dumb’ they can become? Thought we had reached that
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