It’s Not Just AI…
Yes, AI Is a Significant Factor in Education, But There’s Another That’s More So
I am overwhelmed by ChatGPT. Its applications and possibilities are endless: science, healthcare, coding, et al. In addition, I am blown away by its ability to write such clear sentences, showcasing its remarkable linguistic prowess (that last sentence was written by Chat GPT by the way). What’s even more overwhelming is that Chat GPT felt like it came out of nowhere. It wasn’t here Monday and suddenly appeared on Tuesday. People were stunned.
Naturally, as a teacher, I’ve been tuned into how AI is going to impact education. As we were all trying to process the sudden appearance of ChatGPT, and other AI applications, the immediate concern regarding its impact on education focused on students using it to cheat. It turns out that AI based cheating is not nearly as bad as everyone imagined. By and large, students aren’t using it to cheat on tests or write papers. The percentage of students who cheat in school has remained relatively the same — despite the presence of AI tools. Before ChatGPT, around 60% of high school students surveyed admitted to cheating. In 2023, that percentage was about the same.
What has increased, however, is the number of teachers who believe their students are using AI tools to cheat. As a result, more teachers are running student assignments through AI detection programs and the result is not what we want: students afraid to ask teachers about AI and how to use it.
I believe students today are suffering at the hands of technology, as has the generation before them, and this is totally the fault of the adults in the room. Since the advent of the smartphone, and the applications that come preloaded on them, technology has had devastating effects on children’s mental health, their perception of reality, attention spans, their emotional well being and how they socialize. Mind you, social media applications (much like AI) were dumped into the general public with no warning labels manual or instructions; and the results have been horrific.
It should be noted that the Silicon Valley moguls responsible for these creations don’t even let their own kids use them. The billionaire creators of social media go as far as to have their nannies enforce strict social media rules. The former head of growth for Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, said of his work at Facebook (now Meta) “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works” and recommended a break from social media. Sean Parker, an early Facebook investor/executive (immortalized by Justin Timberlake in the film The Social Network) said he and his Facebook colleagues all knew what they were creating, and how it could become addicting. He has since said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains”. Parker, too, does not let his children use it.
Despite this, the Silicon Valley moguls are doing everything they can to prevent any regulations. Yes, they all admit the harm their creations are doing to your kids, but they don’t care. They send their kids to elite private schools knowing they have strict no-phone policies in place. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, doesn’t even allow his 11 year old child to have a phone. But, it’s OK for their products to have devastating impacts on your child’s life. The Silicon Valley moguls, and their children, are much more important than you and your children. These adults continue to dump their products unfettered into society despite the fact that they’re ripping us all apart and causing damage to mental health.
When I attend education conferences, no one talks about this. All everyone wants to talk about is how to use AI and technology in education. Yes, this is important, but what bothers me is that, because of technology, many of our kids are coming to school with classifications and diagnoses that impact how and what they learn. How can we teach our kids anything if they’re walking into school with a mental health diagnosis that directly impacts their learning? What can we teach them if, because of lies and disinformation on social media, their perception of truth and reality is damaged? So, for me, the question we should be asking is not How will AI be used within education? Rather, it’s How will AI be used to improve children’s mental health as well as the state of truth and knowledge so that our children can be properly educated?
I believe we are living inside of an epistemic collapse, and I am not being hyperbolic. What is true? What isn’t? Who’s lying? Who isn’t? Who won the 2020 presidential election? Do vaccines cause Autism? Was the coronovirus pandemic real? These are just some of the basic questions you can ask our collective society right now and you will not get a cohesive answer — and therein lies the problem: because of social media, we have lost the cohesive thread of truth and knowledge that binds and allows us to all function together.
There is a running narrative regarding how politically divded our country is right now. I believe that a significant amount of this divisiveness can be traced to disinformation and lies. I have friends who now live in a world of conspiracy theories and mistruths. They don’t watch any mainstream news channels, read any newspapers, they stay away from books and movies, and some have even stopped watching sports. In lieu of all this, they spend day after day, hour upon hour scrolling through their phones checking Twitter*. That is their main source of “information”. They share Tweets from people who make bizarre claims regarding everything from public health to education to politics.
People often forget that in addition to affecting the lives of adults, this lost sense of what’s real and waht’s not also comes into the classroom. Our kids are walking into school with a corrupted sense of reality regarding the world around them. If you’re a teacher, and have a student whose parent/parents believe the Pizzagate conspiracy, that will now be in your classroom, and you are now responsible for educating a young mind whose sense of reality is completely out of balance. Again, how do you teach a student like that? What can you teach a student like that?
This is all happening at a time when the world is experiencing global shifts on seemingly daily basis, and these are coming environmentally (floods, hurricanes, extreme heat, wildfires), technologically (AI and quantum computing), politically (the rise of extremism and authoritarianism, loss of trust in government), socially and emotionally (undue stress brought on by social media as well as misinformation, lies, and deep fakes) and from a public health perspective (gun violence, food shortages, post-COVID stress, opioid addiction, gun violence). We need to be educating our students to be critical, open minded, creative, and collaborative thinkers. Their world is going to require them to pivot from job to job as well as come up with creative solutions and ideas to navigate a world that is going to be incredibly complex. In essence, our students are going to need minds that have a quality of plasticity. But if they’re existing in a world that has no cohesive sense as to what qualifies as truth and/or knowledge…how are we going to educate students to be this?
*I refuse to call it “X”.
