Education is supposed to be a bit hard
My most pressing issue with using AI in education is that it takes away the friction that is needed to learn. Learning and studying is hard, and with the use of chatbots, there's this kind of idea that knowledge can always be asked and delivered immediately and trusted. It gives little to no nuance to complex situations, and is based on data, which is by default biased.
People need some kind of resistance to work through in order to truly learn new things. Because of the current state of social media and the rise of short form media, it also gets harder to focus on things. When you encounter something you don't quite yet understand, you need to persuade and ask more questions. This is a job that teachers and parents encourage, but now gets undermined by the ability to very easily cheat code your way out of this.
Research⤴ has shown that students with unlimited access to a chatbot perform better as long as the chat functionality is available, but they get dependent on the tool and do worse when access is restricted. Also, the students who already have more knowledge on the subject recognize mistakes in the output more easily. Newbies on the topic are more likely to copy the answers from the tool and therefore learn less.
Izaak Dekker and Felienne Hermans, education experts from the Netherlands, therefore propose onderwijs-en-wetenschap.nl⤴ to bring back friction in education instead of using technology to make learning as frictionless as possible.
It doesn't make teaching easier
Some people believe that technology could bring all students personalized learning experiences which would massively improve the experience of both teachers and students. However, the role of a teacher is not just to deliver information. Often times, it is more about attuning to the student, delivering information in a way that makes sense to them, and giving them personal, real-life motivation. I've written about this before.
Furthermore, it also does not enhance the teaching experience. New digital education systems get enriched with generative AI tooling which is supposed to make checking exams and teaching new knowledge less time-consuming for teachers - but this is unfortunately not the case.
It emphasizes the current struggles in education
Most students get a lot of tests at school. In the Netherlands, this is on average more than 100 tests a year⤴. This is too much for both teachers (so much test checking) and students (so much stress). This performance pressure leads to lots of stress and actually inhibits the cognitive growth of students, since students are only focused on making it through the next tests. There's also not a lot of room and time for personal growth and interests. This system is only focused about measuring, measuring and measuring.
The ability to now also use AI whenever you're doing your school exercises emphasizes the areas where the school system is currently lacking. Why would a student intrinsically motivate themselves to compare different sources and go through all the difficult work in order to write an interesting essay? By using a chatbot, a perfectly fine essay that gives you a good enough score will do just fine and gives you less stress.
Random notes I need to structure
That’s one of the favorite images of pro-AI losers: AI is tool, just like a calculator! They never seem to mention, of course, that calculators are strategically inserted into childhood education relative to the child’s basic skills of arithmetic. Nor do they seem to notice that calculators are not little data machines whereby everything I input gets used to train the machine for free, making the machine’s investors even more rich with every entry. To date, I also don’t know of anyone who is using a calculator for therapy, romantic relationships, or parenting advice. (Substack AI is for losers⤴ by Katherine G. Schmidt)