The aim of education is development of individuals to the utmost of their potentialities. But this statement as such leaves unanswered the question of the measure of the development to be desired and worked for. A society of free individuals in which all, in doing each his own work, contribute to the liberation and enrichment of the lives of others is the only environment for the normal growth to full stature
– John Dewey (1934)
Over the past few months, numerous articles have been published about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools. The power of AI to transform numerous fields of our society is not in question. How it will transform those fields is what the debate is all about. And from Jay Lynch’s perspective in an article for Medium, AI is going to completely destroy the field of education.
Lynch makes some insightful points about the problems of using AI to improve teaching strategies – a process he calls AIEd. The central problem Lynch puts out there is the way student performance (i.e., grades) is often conflated with learning by educational researchers. This is problematic in that grades do not measure what a student has learned, but rather the ability of a student to complete, memorize, and regurgitate information given to them by a teacher.
In short – Lynch argues that because we don’t have reliable measures of learning in the field of education, AI will only be as good as the questions it’s prompted to answer. “If AIEd is going to benefit education, it will require strengthening the connection between AI developers and experts in the learning sciences. Otherwise, AIEd will simply ‘discover’ new ways to teach poorly and perpetuate erroneous ideas about teaching and learning.” What it boils down to for Lynch is teachers already don’t teach so students can learn – they teach do students can perform on tests. Using AI to support teachers in this task will just be more of what Lynch calls, “garbage in, garbage out”. And I don’t disagree with that stance.
While assessing students through paper-based tests does indeed measure performance rather than learning, as described here by psychologist Robert Bjork, if teachers are worried they will lose their jobs because AI can do the task more efficiently, we as a society need to re-assess what we want our teachers to do. And to do that, we have to understand that education and schooling are not the same thing.
Education or Schooling?
Schooling is the specific goals state boards of education have for students to reach. Those goals often manifest in turning schools into places where information is gathered (i.e., through “teaching and learning”) and then regurgitated. This information is organized by what are known as “state content standards” – here are ones for the state I currently reside – and are and have always been highly political. Schooling is what Lynch is critiquing in his article.
The point that AI could allow learning to become tailored to the specific style (which is a debated concept) and interests of students is based on seeing teachers as people who transfer information to students (i.e., state content standards). This is also what people seem to be most fearful about in terms of AI making teachers obsolete – and something I don’t disagree with. AI can be a much more efficient purveyor of information than a human can. Unlike Lynch though, who at the end of his article argued people needed to push back against AI because emotions are essential to learning (“efficiency be damned!” he writes) – I think we let the AI take over schooling, and support teachers in becoming better educators.
Our current public school system – highly influenced by federal reforms of 2001 (No Child Left Behind Act) and 2015 (Every Student Succeeds Act) – centers testing assessment as the measure of success for both teachers and students. What teachers are tasked with and measured by today is mainly centered on their ability to school students. As another psychologist named Robert (this time Sternberg) explained, our current system of schooling develops “smart fools” – students who are really good at passing tests, but really bad at what he described as “cultivating wisdom”:
“Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.”
If AI can design worthwhile activities that support students in schooling to pass tests (e.g., type “Design a group activity on the concept of liberty for a 9th grade civics class” in ChatGPT and be the judge), why not let it crack the system? If we pass schooling to AI, teachers can spend their mental energy working on more important tasks, such as supporting students in “cultivating wisdom.” This could be done by having teachers place an emphasis on education rather than schooling in their goals for student achievement.
Education is what educational researchers are actually trying to measure through the conflation of performance and learning (i.e., tests) that takes place in schools. Education can happen anywhere. It’s culturally sustaining and highly emotional. To be educated is to be engulfed in a relationship with someone who you connect with and who supports your development in numerous ways. The psychologist Lev Vygotsky described this person as the more knowledgeable other. Lych’s point that learning is emotional aligns perfectly with the concept of an education.
Emotions, as educational researcher Mary Hellen Immordino-Yang explained, are an essential component to learning – and are highly relational. The reason why it’s hard to measure education is because how everyone receives it is not standard. Testing is an unreliable measure of learning because tests don’t measure the amount of education a student has but the amount of schooling they have received.
So how did we get here? How have schools become places where students don’t learn but rather are schooled to pass tests? Educational scholar David Labaree has written numerous articles and books (I love this one) about this process.
A Short History of Schooling
In a seminal article – Labaree writes about three goals that the American educational system has moved across throughout the country’s history: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. When the goal of education was democratic equality – schools were places to teach students how to “become citizens” (think white students and think men/boys). This ideal was reflected in the epilogue to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.
In the passage, Jefferson described a process for selecting the “best geniuses” to be “raked from the rubbish” in towns across the country and sent to upper-level grammar schools. In these schools, selected boys would be taught, “Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic” to create a new educated (i.e., schooled) elite to lead the country. Labaree sees schools being designed in this way up until the industrial revolution when a shift to social efficiency was made. In this iteration, schools became sites to train workers – and the idea of “universal education” (i.e., free public schools beyond Jefferson’s vision) became entrenched with efforts of train as many workers as possible.
Former Yale President and educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote extensively about his worries related to this shift. In his 1953 book, The University of Utopia, Hutchins described what he saw as the results of moving from the “democratic” ideals of education toward universal education for job training:
The people have received, as a result of the movement toward universal education, just enough education to permit them to be victimized by advertising and propaganda, not enough to enable them to appraise and resist the arts of those who have been engaged in depriving them of the political power their education was to give them.
Here, Hutchins again is conflating education and schooling. Students were getting schooled in ways that did not educate them to be critical of systems. Our current iteration of schooling is more of the same.
Today, Labaree describes schools as places where students learn skills to be socially mobile. Rather than job training, schools now are places students learn how to compete for social positions (think post-1960s civil rights era). In this iteration –schooling has become a “zero sum game.”
To Labaree – schools have become a place for competition – a place for market economics. And how do we measure markets? By quantifying output (i.e., GDP). Testing in schools is merely a quantification of output. Students are measured not on the process of learning but on their performance. This has had observable outcomes in some of the students I’ve seen coming through the schools I’ve worked in over the past 15 years.
These Kids
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic blew up the way teachers deliver information to their students – I noticed students in the undergraduate and graduate classes I teach were becoming less interested in the processes of learning and completely enamored and obsessed with outcomes – “just let me know what I have to do to get the A” sort of thing. As a teacher, I’m much more interested in the process. How do students engage with the course content? How are they interpreting the main ideas of the course as it relates to their prior and future goals/experiences?
At the end of each semester, I meet with students one-on-one to talk about these questions. More often than not, students are more interested in telling me what they think I want to hear rather than thinking through their perspective on a topic. When I push them on how the topic applies to their personal experience, answers are often shallow. Many seem to think our course is about memorizing content with the goal of regurgitating those points to me on an assessment – these students are a bit frustrated when such an assessment doesn’t happen. Something like, “Jake needs to be more direct about what he wants from us,” is a common comment I read on my class evaluations. I think this lack of critical thinking is a direct outcome of the sort of schooling we’re putting kids through from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) – going through the sort of schooling Labaree describes as being set on competition.
Another sage voice also describes how the process of schooling has influenced the youth – a voice much more influential for my students than my own.
Tell us Taylor.
Taylor Swift holds a very large place in a lot of my students’ lives. I recently saw an interview she did about her song “this is me trying,” which is about someone struggling with addiction. In the interview, her reasoning behind her lyrics really sums up how I think schooling is hurting the development of students. She said:
The second verse is about someone who felt like they had a lot of potential in their life. I think there are a lot of mechanisms for us in our school days, in high school and college, to excel and to be patted on the back for something. And then I think a lot of people get out of school and there are less abilities for them to get gold stars. And then you have to make all these decisions and you have to pave your own way and there’s no set class course you can take, and I think a lot of people feel really swept up in that.
Wow. That’s it. Schooling as we do it in the U.S. today is preparing students to be anxious people who seek their value from others. But Taylor Swift is writing about her experience as a white woman in schools. The anxieties that come with these judgements could be even more dire when the ones who judge you don’t hold the same cultural values as you.
Think about the fact that more than 80% of teachers in the U.S. identify as White, while less than 50% of students in public schools identify the same way. The cultural mismatch this can create is exacerbated by the fact that teachers and students are working in a system where the goal is social mobility – such a goal rests in large part on a student’s ability to learn how to navigate social structures – in schools, this navigation manifests in learning how to get good grades – meeting the expectations of “authority” figures.
This sort of schooling is detrimental to youth development – and AI could be used to destroy this sort of shallowness. Let it go!
Education, on the other hand, should be re-imagined to re-center and extend those early goals Labaree writes about – goals of developing more collaborative human beings.
Moving Toward an Education
Scroll back up to the beginning of this article and read the quote from education philosopher John Dewey written close to 100 years ago. To Dewey, education was about finding oneself – being guided by an adult (i.e., an MKO) on a path to self-realization. A member of the Metaphysical Club, Dewey was one of the leading thinkers at the turn of the 20th Century whose ideas are still read in colleges of education today (mine included). To Dewey – schoolhouses were places where students should be doing.
In this process of doing – self-realization was the ultimate goal – but I think we can do better. Dewey, as educational scholar Mwalimu Shujaa reminds us, neglected to acknowledge the relationship between domination and resistance within schooling. W.E.B Dubois, though, brought that reality into view with his observation that schooling, historically, has restricted the ability of students of color, mainly Black students, from appreciating their cultural history.
To infuse Dewey’s ideals with the realities lived and discussed by Shujaa and Dubois, self-realization could be understood as the beginning of the process in finding a person’s true identity, rather than the end goal. The Blackfoot Nation’s idea of cultural perpetuity could replace schooling through educating. Teachers at all tiers (elementary, middle, and high) would need to begin reconsidering what it means to be a “teacher” – using the Blackfoot Nation frame as a guide could be the starting point to re-design schools as places for educating youth.
In partnership with, “the business community and policy makers” – the National Education Association (NEA) developed what they refer to as the, “5 C’s of education in the 21st century:” Connect, Critique, Create, Collaborate, Care. To me, these are practices (i.e., ways of acting and being) that teachers should be supported in developing. Let the AI convey the information, let the teacher become the guide to self-realization and cultural perpetuity (the MKO).
So, what would this take?
At the elementary level, foundations of living could be taught to students by developing their understanding of what it means to be an “individual”. Here again, understanding who you are at the personal level (i.e., self-actualization) is the bottom, or first step, in the Blackfoot process. By teachers becoming learning guides that show students they can only understand themselves by realizing how they connect with other people – the C’s of connecting and caring would become central to educational philosophy.
This would look similar to re-designing elementary education around the philosophy of “ubuntu.” Scholars on the continent of Africa have already begun pushing their governments to revive pre-colonial ways of thinking around education centered on ubuntu. Such ways would reject notions of competition and individuality based on Western goals of “self-reliance” and replace the idea of “self” as synonymous with community. Self-reliance could still be a central component of elementary education, but the idea of “self” could only be understood in relation to someone else.
I hear my friends who hold “traditional” values yelling this is some socialist poppycock! But we can’t let the extremes hold our education system hostage to their antiquated views of society. We have to move toward the utopias Oscar Wilde reminded us are so important to seek out.
Elementary schools designed around a philosophy of community and caring are not communism, they are humanism. And if we truly do strive for a democratic society – again as Yuval Harari explained, we won’t have one in the future if AI is writing our stories.
But, to begin seeking out this education utopia, we would need a certain type of person to become a teacher. Someone who holds the capacity for self-critique (extending that second C) and is willing to let students teach them a thing or two.
Who Would Teach?
It’s well documented that teachers who do not see themselves through critical lenses (i.e., that don’t understand the ways their race, gender, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity influence their worldview) can act in ways that harm students from historically marginalized and resilient backgrounds even when they have the “best of intentions”. Teachers then, would need to be supported in teacher education programs on strategies for critical self-reflection. Moreover, teachers who went to school in the communities where they plan to teach would become of the upmost importance to guide students on the path toward self-actualization and cultural perpetuity. Grow your Own (GYO) teacher education programs are a way this has already started.
Folks who grew up in specific communities have unique knowledge about that community those who merely work in the community do not share. Think about where you grew up. I’m sure you could tell me a lot more about who influences that community, what businesses are around that contribute in different ways to that community, and how to navigate socially within that community than I could having just found a job at the local high school.
The bloggers on Farnam Street call this sort of knowledge a person’s “circle of competence”. We all have them, and it could be the goal of educators who have lived within specific communities for extended periods of time to share that wisdom with their students – sharing the ways they’ve made the connections they have (the first “C” – connecting) and also showing students how to interdependently navigate within that community (the third “C” – collaborating).
Along with GYO’s – teachers should become purveyors not of information, but critical literacies. If our elementary school system provides students an education that supports self-development by connecting the personal with the social – upper grades (middle/high school) could become places where critique drives learning. The education department within the state government of Victoria, Australia has already made critical media literacy (CML) a central component of what teachers should be learning and teaching students.
To sum it up – AI does is not going to destroy education, it’s going to destroy schooling. And that could be a good thing.
No matter where you sit on the ideological spectrum, you’re going to be affected by AI in your life. To keep education a central component of life for the future, people who make up that field are going to have to change the way their work is done. AI is going to be a part of that – but humans can be too.
Jacob (Jake) Bennett is a father of three who resides in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife, three aforementioned kids, and two dogs. He also has the honor of serving on the faculty within the Department of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College – where he currently teaches courses about social foundations and educational philosophy, critical race theory, and social studies teaching methods.