Educators cannot ignore AI. They should reward curiosity, not punish it.
To help students grasp the opportunities of the post-AI economy and build defences against its misuse, educators must adopt the technology as a learning tool.
My daughter turns 18 this month and, like any parent, I worry about too many opportunities (“Driver’s licence? You are a child!”), as well as too few. As she prepares to make her first career-shaping choices, I am concerned that the education system is failing to prepare her for a post-AI world.
My own investigations and various surveys indicate that teachers are sceptical about AI. It is widely seen as a tool for cutting corners and undermining the established class-homework-test workflow. Perhaps resistance to new tech is natural in a public school system. After all, until the pandemic, teachers were also sceptical of the internet.
However, failing to prepare students for an AI world is a disservice to them. Education is a key lever for encouraging the use of AI to think deeper, not just finish faster. As a parent and citizen, I worry that we are doing enough to prepare the next generation for the challenges and opportunities of the emerging world.
Getting schooled by Taiwan
Neither Europe nor the US is a great place to start. The former is too fixated on rules, the latter on breaking them, and neither is looking out for our kids. Instead, I take inspiration from Audrey Tang, former Digital Minister of Taiwan. In a recent interview, she laid out the foundations of redesigning the education system in 2016:
We considered what a 7-year-old would need to do when they turned 18 in 2027. It was already clear that AI would soon surpass us in all routine cognitive tasks, so we’re wasting their time if we teach them skills that will be automated by then.
In the next two years, these students will be graduating from school. They will not have wasted time memorising and formatting text to produce proof they know stuff. They will have been encouraged to use AI, not just for homework, but as homework. They will be the first AI-native generation.
AI-natives will not just be skilled at doing things faster. Their natural curiosity will have led them to play and experiment with AI, to reframe problems and challenge the questions. Crucially, they will have built better defences against harmful AI, able to deal with falsehoods, biases, weird conversations and misinformation better than their peers.
Hey, teacher, give them kids a bot
From Pink Floyd to Ken Robinson, teachers have long been accused of suppressing curiosity in favour of measuring academic performance. Technology has been dismissed as a distraction at worst (gaming) or a mere convenience at best (internet).
Teachers cannot ignore AI because it can’t just help with the homework; it can literally do it. The default attitude of many teachers is to disallow its use. But, as Gail Gilboa-Freedman of Sapir College told me recently:
Educators are not here to police and discourage AI use, but to adapt the learning environment to students’ natural curiosity about technology, and to lead their mastery of learning.
The “learning environment” is of huge importance. If learning is predicated on meeting standards, students will work in automation mode and “cheat” to meet these standards faster. If learning includes more open-ended briefs, students will be encouraged to use AI for exploring, not just executing.
Calls to rethink education along these principles are not new. In a 2013 TED talk, Ken Robinson branded old-fashioned homework as “low-grade clerical work”. As AI is set to automate this kind of work, it is clear that students using AI are not cheating — the system is cheating them out of essential skills.
Educating tomorrow’s citizens
My daughter would like to use AI for school, but she will need to use AI for work. To grasp the opportunities of the emerging economy, she needs an education that welcomes disruption to established workflows and encourages her to use AI as a learning tool.
But schools are not only educating tomorrow’s professionals, they are educating tomorrow’s citizens. If they refuse to teach with AI, how will future voters be prepared for the emerging public life? Audrey Tang hits the nail on the head with the new priorities for education:
We must focus on curiosity, collaboration, and civic engagement to encourage active political participation. After all, we won’t be sending robots to conduct political debates for us.