AI technology is already impacting education. Should we ban it harder or encourage its integration?
“Students are cheating by using ChatGPT to write their essays and other homework. It’s plagiarism, even if it’s original. We need to ban it. In fact we already have, but we want to ban it more somehow.” I’ve heard some variation of this several dozen times. My response is always the same: Let the kids play.
For generations, homework has been sold as the bedrock of academic success. It’s the core component of grades and student achievement awards, college entrance, and by implication success in life as well. Homework has been the cornerstone of education for over 100 years.
AI tools are tearing this illusion apart in real time. Homework isn’t education — it’s a compliance test. And AI just made that undeniable.
A Century-Old Illusion
The current school system was designed in the late 19th century, and it was designed with a deliberately soulless purpose: turning the masses from clan-style family businesses and cottage industries into proper factory workers that could fuel big business and state interests.
There wasn’t much homework in the “three R’s” programs of the wildly successful one-room schoolhouses with their mixed ages, because after school the children were learning from their parents and doing productive chores. Homework entered as a way to encourage rote repetition, erase “wasteful” free time, and thus discourage ambition and opportunity to question your schoolmasters.
We may call them teachers today, but their role hasn’t changed and the results are appalling. In spite of the US spending 4% of our entire national budget, less than 1/3rd of 8th graders can read or do math at that basic level. Forget rocket science, we’re at risk of losing enough people to perform the most basic STEM functions in our nation.
The goal of the whole system is to reward memorization, not produce mastery. To train obedient thralls who will show up on time and follow instructions, not to think critically.
The Creativity Crusher
NASA research shows that students at age 5 who are just entering this system of concentration-shattering bells and social-conformity lessons are creatively brilliant, able to learn quickly and with the curiosity and drive to do so. Before they leave that elementary school, though, two-thirds of that vanishes. Why would they keep it? They aren’t using any of it. The adults they’re around are all saying to obey more than to explore.
And their behavior grows more and more to mimic a culture none of us want for our young people: that of gangs in prisons. We may joke about the jocks and the nerds, but it’s as real now as it was in Grease. Goldfish trapped in a bowl will attack anyone showing sickness or weakness.
Enter the little inmates’ ultimate shortcut, a tool sent by the gods of Sillicon Valley to help them regain their freedom. Just as social media gave them internal breathing room, now LLMs are giving them external breathing room by freeing up their time again. Profligacy reigns in these early days of freedom, but I can’t highlight it enough: ChatGPT and Khanmigo don’t cheat the system — they reveal its shallowness and ineffectiveness. Kids aren’t bypassing “learning” as their pearl-clutching jailors are screaming.
Award-Winning Alternatives
Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto revealed his methods for turning whole rooms full of “hopeless” problem students into high achievers as part of his resignation. He simply got them out of the classroom environment and gave them permission to explore what they found interesting again, exactly the sort of thing they would be doing with their free time.
He likened schools to “factories of childishness” where learning is removed from all normal context and indifference to the real world. Curiosity is crushed and with it all hope of meaningful learning.
When students are leveraging these tools to complete their homework duties, they’re bypassing nonsense that they don’t want and doesn’t serve their interests. When a student writes a book report in two minutes after barely skimming the text, you need to first address why he doesn’t want to read the book, not complain he did the work wrong. Especially if the result is … the fully completed homework you asked for.
Just a few years ago, these same people were complaining about kids not wanting to do homework at all, now they’re complaining about how they’re getting it done. Is it any wonder so many kids view schools as enemy prison camps and drag their feet about going or achieving?
You see, the use of the tools exposes children’s desire to direct their own learning. It’s not some magical addictive quality that causes a student to obsess over a recently-acquired video game. It’s a choice. And the skill of studying and mastering a good game is more useful than a slightly more grown-up version of coloring by number. The deep excitement at the self-driven, self-selected task is because that free time is so precious.
User Experience Woes
The workload on students is insane. Early waking and rushed breakfast scrambling, only to wait on the bus while contemplating how small and insignificant you must be in the face of such an enormous and rough-fitting cogwork. Then each period you just sink into learning and focus when the bell sends you scrambling to visit a locker and rush to the next class with barely enough time to even care for basic animal needs like the bathroom, much less networking with peers they may need to ask to borrow a pencil from later. No talking in class after all, and phones ought to be confiscated or left at home too so no digital connections either! Stop escaping the environment! No distractions! I’m trying to reprogram you for society’s good!
It doesn’t stop when you get home either. After sports practice or another extracurricular you’re encouraged to do to qualify for college and enhance your resume, you get home and eat dinner and take care of the dog and then school rears up again: each class is expected to have at least 15 minutes of homework to do after dinner … is there even anything left before bedtime when you’re getting up at 5:30am?
Students are eager for these AI tools, and they’re learning to leverage them to free up their time just like entrepreneurs are. They’re synthesizing faster, learning to manage a digital secretary, and solving real problems. They’re becoming strategic thinkers and streamlining their work. That’s better learning than at least half of their classes! That’s a 21st century education! This is the future we dreamed up in the Jetsons: the robots doing the work, humans doing the management. So why are teachers mad?
Inflated Credentials, Deflated Impact
Schoolmasters are being exposed as obsolete and ineffective. The inmates are escaping the prison, and they’re the first ones on the chopping block. Remember, these are their careers at stake so there’s a vested interest in avoiding a big shakeup or redefinition of their work environment.
But we needn’t respect these eggshell-fragile egos, as the 2011 research by Cory Koedel and others like him have proven: entire college education departments have their students averaging A grades. These fainting violets haven’t ever been challenged in the real world themselves, hiding behind a degree that is a truly meaningless credential. The epidemic of grade inflation where true performance metrics keep getting watered down started right in the educators’ own education. The system needs these pawns to sustain itself, so “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” still to this day. That’s a quote from 1905, so us not having addressed it sooner is more our failing than these go-along-to-get-along schoolmasters.
The Golden Goose is Still Alive
Homework has been a method of control, in a puritanical “idle hands are the devil’s plaything” mode of thinking that play and individual ambition must be brooked, not encouraged. However, the Prussian-style schools and thus the centralized State are losing their grip.
The institutional inertia of a century of successfully converting thriving capitalistic nations of yeoman artisans into a corporations’ playground has now decayed to the point that the system is playing defense against the natural human spirit and the power technology gives to those seeking freedom and self-rule.
If we as adults are serious about serving our young people and charting a course which will reinvigorate the youth to rebuild our failing infrastructure, fill empty neighborhoods with confident children for tomorrow, and solve the major problems of the modern world that get treated like unsacred cash cows, the advent and embrasure of LLMs and AI tools presents a golden opportunity.
From Ossuaries to Opportunities
With AI we have a lever powerful enough to shift the bloated bureaucracy without burning it all to the ground and starting fresh with all the waste that avenue of renewal entails. We must call for project-based learning founded on real-world problem-solving and historically-informed issues. We must teach every subject in an integrated way, and mix ages so older students learn to tolerate and teach while younger students learn from the more experienced.
We can integrate live human assessment with AI practice and research, getting the best of human time investment on both the teacher and student side of the equation. Teachers can move into more of an accessible mentorship role instead of lifting the unnecessary burden of command, and let play, curiosity and character-building effort replace rote repetition and memorization.
It is not vital to know every fact if you can grasp the whole picture. In fact, puzzles are always easiest if you build that border first, and let the facts filter in after that context is established. Homework must die; learning should look like thriving, smiling, energized kids. Celebration, not mourning.
Learning From Calculators
All that the wild herds of AI have done to date is expose the practiced theatre of childhood indoctrination. It has not damaged the present broken system at all. But harness these horses and our achievers will not have to walk through the long deserts of maturation after leaving school, they will ride far beyond where we presently stand.
The future belongs to the curious, not the compliant. The future belongs to those who leverage the strongest tools the most, not those stuck in backwards methodologies, religiously held sacred as if nobody could ever out-think Johann Julius Hecker or John Dewey.
Schools fought other technological mental multipliers that exposed this same flaw, very successfully, over the years. Remember the battle of calculators, with all the crowing that “You won’t have one in your pocket every day”?
The more they fight, the less relevant and more removed our centers of education are from the world they claim to be preparing their charges for. Instead of temples to divine truths, they have become mausoleums to the ancient dead.
Join the Conversation
In my next article, we will explore more concrete matters and apply these heady ideas. Let’s not waste any time putting this emotional fuel to use to change the way things are. After all, ChatGPT told me that humans do not sit around clucking and repeating what other humans say, but we build and make and create. Continue this conversation with me as I build educational tools and let me hear your thoughts on AI involvement in education over on my Substack: paulaspen.substack.com
