#14: AI + School

The educational system could use an upgrade

For over one hundred years, children and young adults have followed roughly the same educational set of norms. Wake up early, hop on a yellow bus, file into a room with rigid chairs and worn-out desks and then listen to an adult recite a monologue. As a student, you are forced to memorize information and regurgitate via a multiple-choice test or a written essay.

I’m sure you can picture this scene quite vividly. And I bet your parents and grandparents experienced a similar layout as well.

It’s crazy to me that there’s been such rapid and significant technological innovation over the past century, yet we are still running back the same stale educational system year after year.

It’s only fair that I share my bias before I continue – I’ve never been the biggest proponent of memorization-based learning. As a kid, I saw the educational system as an assessment of how well you can follow the rules. And don’t get me wrong, I played the game – I did what I had to do to “succeed”. I’m the eldest sibling in my family, so naturally I’m a rule follower. But I wasn’t a fan.

I didn’t start enjoying the learning process until I got to college where I took part in discussion-based classes. As I became more self-aware in the real world, I realized that the people I deemed “most successful” were those who broke the rules, not followed them. My college educational experience was fulfilling and enriching, but once it was wrapped up, I knew I wasn’t going back to a classroom. Seeing the lack of structure in the workforce and comparing it to the regimented, cookie-cutter process of “school”, I couldn’t justify continuing a classroom education. School wasn’t evolving at the same rate technology was impacting the real world, so what was the point of attending further? I don’t need to memorize more facts if I can simply Google them. Particularly coming from someone who majored in a type of business. Of course, the last few lines don’t apply to specialty fields that requires an advanced degree, like medicine or law.

School as we know it has stayed the same for one hundred years, it’ll likely stay the same for another one hundred years. Right?

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Enter AI.

AI has disrupted how people access, retain, and communicate information. Now, you receive a singular answer to a question and can learn everything about that topic as quickly as you can type out the question in the prompt line. AI is incredible for not only finetuning written prose but also writing a whole essay from scratch.

I’ll push further: how can we expect students not to rely on ChatGPT for their essays when it’s freely available?

Sure, you can have students write essays in person or do math problems by hand to avoid AI interference. And that may work in earlier grades as developing a baseline memory structure is necessary. However, I don’t know how productive it is for a high school student to write an essay by hand if everything they will write from here on out will be on a keyboard.

With the rapidly evolving AI landscape, LLMs will continue to get sharper and more capable. Moreover, as resources on effective prompt engineering become more widespread, little Jimmy will turn in an A+ essay every time. Those AI detector programs won’t stand a chance. I often ask myself, 'Will knowing how to write become redundant?' But perhaps I should be asking, 'Which skills won’t become redundant?’”

In some ways, I am thankful that I learned how to write and do math problems in the old-fashioned way: without computers or AI. My guess is that my perspective on how to do things without AI makes me even more effective at using AI tools. I know how to structure my thoughts and can start with the end in mind because I’ve done the hard work of seeing what that final output looks like time and time again.

Perhaps that’s what we need to focus on: how to structure thoughts. Since AI can do the work for you.

With classes focused less on memorization of technical knowledge and more on how to think, we’ll prepare the next generation for a life where synthesized information is a commodity. Communication will become the most paramount skill with a dual mandate: learning how to communicate with other humans and technology. Prompt engineering should be taught in middle school and beyond, since students need to learn how to access the information they no longer have to memorize. And don’t forget, we still have humans to interact with. More discussion-oriented classes at a young age will help students develop their own baseline for how to tackle the ambiguity of the real world. From the teacher’s perspective, it’s much harder for students to cheat if they are assessed on how well they can present/communicate information instead of writing it down.

Furthermore, the transition of the educational system won’t come without casualties. The students who rely on ChatGPT to do their homework but aren’t taught how to think or communicate will be left behind. Entire sub-industries will need to be revamped (looking at you SAT and ACT) to meet the requirements to succeed in an AI world. Change won’t be easy, and there will be challenges along the way.

But it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game. I’d argue that technology has made life today better for humans than ever before. Let’s continue evolving our mindset and rethinking old systems so tomorrow can also be as good as it gets for humans too.