A few short weeks ago, Newton’s first graders might have been lolling on sandy beaches, digging the best holes ever. High schoolers were likely spending unadulterated hours hanging out or demonstrating grown-up competence at their summer jobs.
Now both face months of being told what to do—and being tested on how well they did it. School is back in session.
Kids will naturally chafe against this loss of independence. Some will look for any shortcut to get back some of the time and control parents and teachers are obligated to temper.
As we all know, taking shortcuts, as well as outright cheating, is now easier than ever. Artificial intelligence is there to do the work for them.
Teachers are beginning this year with their own feelings of a loss of control. Some of us have dusted off the blue books we haven’t used in years. Some will only assign written work completed under our own watchful eyes.
Other colleagues, though, are working hard to get with the times, feeling obliged to meet the future head on. The Newton Public Schools, as a matter of policy, “recognizes that AI can be a powerful tool to enhance learning, and teachers may find opportunities both to teach students about AI and to have students use AI in learning.”
The president of Dartmouth College goes one step further. She wrote recently in The Atlantic, “If universities hope to remain relevant in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, they should strive to guide students to understand and use these tools productively.”
Perhaps my own feeling of lost agency finds its roots in her passive construction.
My students and I are not living in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, but rather in a world in which a relatively small group of people are using AI to shape it and us.
As they did with the screens that failed to bring us promised leaps in achievement, but did, in fact, cause our kids harm, tech barons are again set on raiding school budgets and establishing how we should all be conditioned to work.
The phones and laptops arguably snuck up on us. It took a while, and some effort, to see how they affected children’s thinking. That work has finally begun to rid our classrooms of them, even as the state legislature slow-walks new rules. Now, blind faith in a new technology seems to be dictating the terms of education once again.
I can understand the anxiety that prompts the willingness to get on board. The old guarantee that our children will do better than we did is questionable in today’s economy. AI promises to cut another rung off the ladder. Instead of our kids graduating with a choice of computer programming jobs, we wonder if they’ll be the lucky ones to be quality control inspectors for a hundred bots crunching code.
Into this world of insecurity children carry their developmentally appropriate search for agency. Pushed and pulled by parents and teachers, they naturally look for ways to take greater charge over their lives. So while Silicon Valley incessantly pitches its AI products and their magical efficiency, teachers must, with increasing futility, implore young people of still evolving maturity to make the moral choice to deny themselves and leave their browsers closed.
In making my plea to students, I’ll try to get them to understand a few important things.
I might start with the ethical consideration that the major AI companies are making their profits off looted intellectual property. Their models hawk words and ideas they pretend just fell off the back of literate society’s truck.
I’d tell them that, just as when Big Tech began harvesting their data through their phones, students are again the product. Just as when the corporate test makers and the laptop manufacturers first ogled the goldmine of school budgets, their education will become a commodity.
I would teach them that when the AI agent completes the problem set, or writes the essay, or even drums up an extra set of practice questions for an honest study session, they aren’t gaining control. They are losing it, handing over their thinking and trading in their attention to the common denominator of computer models.
They already know I am a romantic. So I might get away with telling them that they are missing something awesome when the muse eventually awakens as you sit alone finally getting the paper started after your parents believe you have gone to bed.
I am obviously working out my own feelings of control. The insistence on AI’s inevitability, its swift ubiquity, and the pressure to get with the program all assault some of my fundamental beliefs about education.
Changing minds is slow work. Knowledge must become embodied. Trust forms the bedrock of student-teacher relationships. We always must pursue the Emersonian ideal of the individual mind, the mind that thinks for itself.
Maybe I can’t fight it. But perhaps the tangibility of a pen balanced between the thumb and index finger laying ink across the surface of real paper can let kids know what is being taken away from them—and all of us.
Tom Fabian is an English teacher at Newton North High School and faculty advisor to its student newspaper, the Newtonite. He can be reached at tfabianteaching@gmail.com.