Could AI Break Schools? I Hope So.

We've accepted such a low level of meaningfulness in our schooling.

As a former Middle School teacher and a former public school student, I believe our schooling system fails in one of its most critical tasks: to provide education that is emotional significant, i.e., meaningful, to students. Instead, our schools continue to rely on coercive practices to force students to acquire predetermined chunks of intellectual meaning. The result is an epidemic of student disengagement that we consider to be the normal state of affairs.

While I had largely given up on seeing fundamental change to our schooling system in my lifetime, I’m now wondering if the development of generative AI could be a sort of wrecking ball to bring about some of the radical transformation in education I’ve been hoping for.  That’s what I attempt to explore in this post.

To be clear, teaching was the most difficult job I ever had and I have tremendous respect for K-12 teachers, many of whom shell out their own money for school supplies and put their hearts and souls into their vocation. I want public schooling to continue and flourish. My beef is with our persistently autocratic system of education that suffocates students’ natural desire to make-meaning, despite the good intentions of many teachers. 

In addition, I have big concerns about AI, including ethical ones, and so I’m not trying to promote naive techno-optimistic arguments about AI.

Autocratic Schooling

Our standard educational approach (for K-12 public and private schools), in which 20-35+ children of the same age are made to sit still in a classroom for most of the school day while an adult directs every aspect of their learning activities, is ineffective and damaging. While many teachers might argue that they engage their students in active learning, rather than long lectures, I would encourage them to consider how little say students have in the content and structure of these activities. Sure, in high school, students can have some selection of classes, but this is a narrow range of choices of subject matter that are still delivered in the same manner — autocratically.

That word may sound too strong to be applied to kind teachers who care about their students, but when you consider how little actual power a student has, what else can we call it? Certainly it is nothing resembling democracy.

Young people who are never given opportunities to practice meaningful democracy at school are much more likely to grow up to be politically disengaged citizens who are distrustful of democracy. Making decisions about the prom theme is not what I’m talking about – students should have some meaningful decision making power over what they learn and how they learn it. While we like to brag that we’re a democratic republic (in the US), most of us spend our youth in dictatorial school environments, then we move on to dictatorial work environments in adulthood. 

From the perspective of the meaning-making model I’ve been developing on this blog, schools are generally a disaster. Good meaning-making requires personal agency and the building of meaningful relationships. I’ve already covered the lack of agency for students, but what about relationships? In most classroom settings, interactions between students are viewed as a distraction unless they follow the very narrow definition of “staying on task.” Students must sneak in relationship-building between classes. On every day of every year in school, my son has had a mathematics class, but he has never had a class devoted to building and maintaining relationships. 

This commitment to narrow intellectual learning at the expense of emotionally significant learning stifles our natural love of learning. Just as I watched my own innate passion for learning get ground away by the schooling system, I have watched it again with my son, and I regret not having had the resources earlier in his school life to find alternatives or homeschool him. My own love of learning was reborn after taking a three-year break from school and then attending Goddard College, which had a radical student-centered, democratic approach to learning in which I designed my own educational program. Goddard was transformative for me (and has, unfortunately, closed.).

AI as a Catalyst for Change?

I despised being subject to autocracy as a student and I hated being an autocrat as a teacher. Why do we keep doing education this way? Besides the daunting task of forcing students to study content that is not emotionally meaningful to them, teachers are also tasked with measuring the students’ intellectual absorption of the required material (to produce grades), along with other paperwork and school duties.

In this atmosphere of overworked adults attempting to implement a program of pervasive control and measurement of children, AI is clearly problematic because it’s giving students such a powerful way to game the system – to cheat. Did the kid actually write this essay, answer this question, or complete this calculation? It’s getting harder and harder to tell. Since our educational approach is so essentially coercive, and many students have so little investment in the content they didn’t choose, and which is being delivered through lecture, worksheets and painfully dull textbooks, why wouldn’t students be incentivized to game the system? 

Yes, in-class exams are still a counter-strategy as they require students to cram and memorize (and quickly forget) content, and perhaps our test-driven education will become even more test-obsessed, but that’s just going to drive students into even more advanced gaming strategies with ever more powerful AI.

I would have used AI, as a public school student, in all but a few of the classes that I actually enjoyed (e.g., architectural drafting, art, woodshop). At Goddard College, where my education was almost completely in my control and I was studying things I was passionate about, I had no incentive to cheat and would only have used AI as a learning assistant. This is  the essential point: AI is only problematic when you are attempting to force students to learn things that aren’t meaningful to them. 

My hope is that the gig is up – AI is challenging us to take coercion out of education. And it’s also potentially providing tools to make education more personalized, engaging and, hell, more sustainable for teachers. 

When I was a teacher, the most rewarding experiences for me were when I had the time to connect with students one-on-one or in small groups and engage with them on something they cared about. It was the larger scale of teaching that was typically the source of my frustrations – herding big classes of students around the building, keeping track of students who might have “illegally” wandered out of class, the grading of hundreds of assignments on the weekend instead of decompressing from the workweek. 

Since web-connected AI clearly has access to so much information and can organize it much more quickly and effectively than most humans can, the traditional role of teacher as gatekeeper and deliverer of information is undermined, which is a relief. 

AI has many risks, including being used as a tool of autocracy, but for our schooling system, I remain hopeful that it can be a tool of both creative destruction and revitalization. Nothing else has been capable of dislodging our worn-out autocratic educational methodology.