VICTOR JOECKS: How AI undermines education
If you want to develop human intelligence, you can’t let students rely on artificial intelligence.
Generative AI will transform the world, even if no one is quite sure what the end product will look like. These are artificial intelligence programs that create new content based on prompts or questions submitted by a user.
You can imagine the problems this has created for schools and teachers. Programs such as ChatGPT can solve a student’s hardest math problem and spit out papers in seconds.
Some in the education establishment believe the best path forward is to teach students how to incorporate AI into their learning. The Clark County School District has begun testing AI in the classroom. In April, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “promoting the appropriate integration of AI into education.” In 2024, more than a quarter of teens said they had used ChatGPT for homework.
While some uses of AI in education could be beneficial, there is a real danger.
Education has two main purposes. The first is to provide moral instruction. The second is to train students to think.
Consider this. Imagine your son is lost in a forest, miles from safety. First, he needs to know where to go — that’s the moral compass. Second, he needs to know how to hike and overcome the obstacles on his path — that’s the intellectual training.
Schools have long since abandoned their duty to pass along society’s broad moral values. AI won’t fix that problem. But perhaps, generative AI could help with academics. With ChatGPT, even a D student can produce an A-quality paper on the major themes of “Romeo and Juliet.” Shouldn’t schools teach students how to accomplish their tasks more efficiently?
This confuses ends and means. When students have to write a paper on “Macbeth,” they view the paper as the goal. But it’s actually the means to a far more important end.
The key product of a school paper is a mind sharpened by the task of writing. Writing forces you to research a topic. It forces you to organize your thoughts. It often forces you to present and defend a thesis. It makes you do all this in a way that can be understood by other people. Then that writing is improved by review and revision. These are incredibly useful mental abilities.
A student’s English teacher isn’t hoping for some groundbreaking insight when she reads her 500th paper on “Hamlet.” The grade and feedback she gives on papers show students what they need to work on in this process.
Think of it this way: Why does a football player bench press? After all, there are machines that can lift far more weight than he could ever hope to lift. Plus, he’ll never bench press in a game. Football involves running and tackling, not lying down in one spot.
Yet no one thinks it’s odd for football players to hit the weight room. Lifting weights builds the muscles that allow players to perform better.
The brain is a muscle, too. Schools need to demand students exercise this muscle through papers, test and homework, not outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.
Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.
