How will Artificial Intelligence (AI) impact education? Many articles, books and seminars have sought to address the topic. It’s a complicated. Sorting out the valuable from the snake oil only adds to the difficulty. Robert Pondiscio’s op-ed, The illusion of Learning: The Danger of Artificial Intelligence to Education can help bring some much-needed clarity to a confusing topic.
Pondiscio is a serious scholar and observer of American education at the American Enterprise Institute. He rightly ties the current debate over AI to previous heated debates in the 1990s about learning skills over knowledge (See: E.D. Hirsch: You Can Always Look it Up – Or Can You?). Hirsch argued against the excesses of progressive ideology that asserted knowing how to do something is the same as knowing something. Such thinking, Hirsch asserts, has made us less educated and less knowledgeable about the world we live in.
Fast Forward to the 2020s. The ongoing debate over AI continues to repeat the progressive claim about knowing. Pondiscio realizes the similarities and is smart enough to sound the alarm. Pondiscio writes:
What Hirsch feared might happen to students who relied too heavily on search engines pales next to the complacency invited by AI, which offers the illusion of mastery without the work of learning. It allows both students and teachers to skip the hard part – the thinking.
To know anything deeply, you must wrestle with it. The effort itself the sorting, comparing, rephrasing, struggling to make sense of what you read – is where learning occurs. Cognitive scientists call this productive struggle or desirable difficulty. “There is a consensus in cognitive psychology that it takes knowledge to gain knowledge,” Hirsch wrote in 2000. “Yes, the internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips. But to be able to use that information — to absorb it, to add to our knowledge—we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge. That is the paradox disclosed by cognitive research.”
Pondiscio sees the AI problem clearly. AI produces a fluent, credible answer while the student’s mind remains largely idle. Excellent work can be submitted with having done excellent thinking.
The temptation Pondiscio notes, is not new. Spellcheckers made us worse spellers. Calculators made us less aware of important mathematical operations. The fundamental difference. Those technologies all enhanced or accomplished low-level skills. AI is directed at higher-order thinking, the very things that help define an educated or well-rounded person.
Hirsch and Pondiscio rightly understand the threat regarding knowledge as dual; one is to the individual; one to society.
AI’s real threat is that it not only accesses information, but it also evaluates it and packages it. In so doing, AI also makes evaluative and judgmental decisions as to what’s important, what’s not, and decides how to communicate information. That’s an important task. Why? As Pondiscio writes, developing judgement is the entire point of education.
Coupling that thought with the conviction that knowledge is both a private and civic good, you understand the importance of getting AI right. If individuals surrender the tasks that allow us to make good judgements, increase our understanding of complex issues and narratives, they become easy prey for those who seek to manipulate us.
So, what’s to be done? Pondiscio notes:
We should use AI as we use any powerful tool, with caution, curiosity and a clear sense of purpose. But we should take great care — student and teachers alike – to resist substituting the efficiency of AI with the slow, irreplaceable labor of teaching and learning. Because the great danger of AI is not that it will outthink us but that it will tempt us to stop thinking altogether.
AI is here. Like the advent of the computer forty years ago, it holds both peril and promise. We’d do well to heed the words of Pondiscio – and Hirsch—and work to keep AI in its proper place.
