Stop blaming students, a quick note about AI in the schools

I don’t know how many complaints I’ve read about how AI is ruining education because students use it to write their papers and thus bypass the valuable process of thinking for themselves. Yes, I see that that is a problem. Learning to write is an important part of education. It’s not just the skill of writing, but the process of THINKING that effective writing requires. If you want to learn, you have to do the work. You aren’t going to learn by farming it out to an AI.

But: DON’T BLAME THE STUDENTS. They’re only doing what we taught them to do. We created the problem and now it’s up to us to fix it.

The problem is that we’ve created an educational system that focuses on a superficial measure of outcomes, the grade. How often to teachers in primary and secondary schools “teach to the test”? That is, how often do they skew instruction in a direction that results in higher student scores on the standard tests used by administrators and bureaucrats to evaluate schools? Students pick up on that mentality. Nor is the whole corrupt game confined to primary and secondary schools. It continues in colleges and universities, even the best ones.

THAT’s the problem, that whole Industrial Age production-line model for education. That’s the culprit. That’s what needs to be changed. AI is forcing us to rethink education from the bottom up. How do we create an educational environment where students use AI got get the routine stuff that the need to do something interesting. What a novel idea, have students do something interesting.