A.I. Just Might Save Education

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It was our third meet-up in 2 years about “unethical work”. I slid the paper across the table to his mom and gave her time to read. It was obvious, no AI detector necessary. He had opted out of effort, again, and used AI to write his paper.

At this point my exasperation had turned pensive. All of my expectations for this student had simmered to something primal.

“You know, I don’t actually care what you turn in. I just want it to be you. I want to hear you, get a glimpse of you. All of this reading and writing, in the end is about growing you – not a paper, not a correct answer, not a format.”

I could tell he didn’t believe me, he was fresh from a broken system, and to make any honest attempt was to be vulnerable and he had had courage drained from him. It was in that moment that I was thankful for Charlotte Mason’s method of education. I was able to not only say the thing that perhaps all educators espouse but show him that that we were in fact different than what he had experienced. Demonstrate evaluation schemes in which personhood and character and care had measurable metrics. Show, not just say that education is about growth as a person.

It was somewhere in that conversation, one of many I have had around AI and ethical work, that I realized that all of the doom and gloom framing AI as a nimbus cloud soon to envelop society could have a silver lining.

Truth be told, education long ago lost the plot and it might just be that AI will highlight a long running vein of tainted thought in our systems reminding us that the purpose of education was never actually about the right answer, or a perfectly formatted paper, or objectives. Each element of education has the potential to nourish growth as persons, mold what it means to be human; and yet somehow in our crush for utility we have degraded those things to content to be categorized, evaluated, and quantified.

Education has become something quite apart from ourselves, something to obtain, a commodity. The aim of education should be the gaining of a dense personhood with all of the mechanical benefits coming by-the-way, rather than the production of a product clasped by a shell of a graduate too frail to wield it.

AI has shaken the field of education as we scramble to come up with new ways to evaluate understanding and motivate care. Handwritten papers, in person exams, oral evaluations on the spot. In the bustle, many of our objectives are beginning to sound hollow. Did that assignment carry weight, or was it just a vehicle for a grade? Which parts of our educational processes are worthy of the extra effort now placed on the educator to police, and which parts were just busy work? Which ideas and skills matter in the final estimation, what do students need to actually walk away with in the end?

For a time, technology made the traffic of education smoother and faster and so more frenetic; quizzes, rubrics, and analytics became digitized with the result being that our prescriptions for students ballooned as we reveled in their data.

But now the winds of technology have turned and are blowing in another direction and as we collectively try to catch our breath, we find ourselves forced to narrow focus and redefine priorities. What are we doing with our time, with these spaces, with all of these resources? Has it worked? Have the chatter, and funding, and policies, born fruit? Are the people we are educating more humane, more magnanimous, more capable of broad and decisive thought, more capable? It is another way of asking, has our society made gains on a human level or merely a technological one?

AI stands poised to remind us that the goal of education was never actually about the correct answer after all. If it was, we wouldn’t be so panicked. Pure practicality and utility is before us, and rather than rejoicing we feel chilled in its wake. The drill and angst over scores and placements all feel terribly shortsighted as the narrow set of skills insisted upon are so crisply snatched up by the machines.

There must have been something more we were after, deeper to have attained. In reducing education to the mechanics we outsourced ourselves. Best case scenario AI turns us round, causes us to ponder who we are, a definition that must include more than just what we can accomplish. What is it we want for the next generation? What is it we fear we are on the cusp of losing?

Personhood.

Well rounded, outward facing, magnanimous. Care, curiosity, and a calibrated conscience. Fortitude, courage, and initiative. Dexterity of mind and body. Generosity of thought, goods, and affection. It is these things that make a society good and civilization stable. People with these traits are the best at whatever they find to turn their hand to. It is these people who have the potential to benefit us in all the material ways we expect, but also in the immaterial ways we are nostalgic for.

In this age of outsourced utility, in what mode should education now fashion itself? I would argue, the one we deserved all along. A truly human approach that feeds all parts of us as if we were in fact living beings with both tangible and intangible parts. An approach that calls forth the good while attenuating the evil, motivates innovation, and perseverance.

Fleshed out this would look like an education that never offers fact unclothed from its corresponding idea. Rather than generating chopped fodder to perform mental gymnastics upon, it would lead with ideas, which is another way of saying, it would begin with the human element of every subject and skill set and there would never be an upper level of study in which this was not still the pivot of every conversation and interaction.

Upon this foundation it would hammer out the habits and disciplines of a good life as opposed to a test objective, things like: the habit of attending, recall, planning, organization, flexibility, and impulse control; a tidy little package we have labeled  “Executive Function Skills” and which is now widely recognized as being a greater determiner of success and happiness than IQ or test scores.

This human education would recognize that growth happens from the inside out, that it is a holistic process that can’t be dissected into skill sets and expect the lifeblood of thought and ingenuity to flow between the parsed pieces splayed upon our data sheets. It would prioritize the fact that it is the inward parts we must nurture first and that we must allow space within the lesson and the day and continuity between years of study for those things to be assimilated rather than quantified. This education would operate upon the premise that if a person is well-fed, materially and immaterially… growth is inevitable.

An education that believed these things wouldn’t offer students only the pieces they could master. Would not allow their talents to be honed to a brittle point; but would insist on time for even the things they have no aptitude for as avenues of humility and generous thought towards others. This education would push for density of personhood ahead of utility. A dense personhood has substance, something to offer, something to push up against, but not around.

Human density is gained immaterially the same way it is gained materially.

Effort.

Effort of mind, body, and will.

Coming up against things that are a bit too heavy, offerings that carry no expectation of mastery. Skills that are graduated, but ideas that dazzle.

An education that wants to raise humane people would allow content and space for a student to tap out, to reach their limit and have it not be marked as failure. Failure is of equal value to achievement on this human scale. All effort builds density, even failed effort; It also builds courage. Where is this in our system of education? Candor and willingness to try the hard thing paired with the reciprocal ability to candidly fail are what make a person golden.

If these things were prized, if personhood were the goal of our efforts, there would be no temptation to cheat or shirk – the challenge and the effort would be of equal value to achievement with the resultant being achievements would soar.

***

The slow fade to technology usurping rightful human spaces began long ago. Once we relegated writing to a set of objectives calibrated to grade level, rather than the relational act of ingesting, assimilating, and expressing of ideas; once the maths and sciences had correct answers monetized and then untethered themselves from ideas of ethics and conscious; once the end determined the means; once the human element was shorn away, it was only a small step to allow AI to accomplish our mechanistic goals in our stead, to allow them to handle the creation and manipulation of content and data, those naked corpses of human endeavor.

“Why not use AI?” This is the new, and challenging, conversation we are having with this generation of students because the young are nothing if not candid. Teachers tangle themselves in ropes of explanation, while students see more clearly than we through the facade of our requirements. We halfheartedly appeal to something in education we vaguely remember but haven’t reproduced well enough for the next generation to see.

When we trained our young for speed reading, skimming, and scanning for titles and key words in a text specifically stripped down and formatted for that mechanical process, we primed them to ask the question, why not just let AI do it? If the goal is content, if the goal is a list of objectives, AI can do it better.

Why read the book?

Why write the paper?

Why read the paper?

Once upon a time the answer would have been that there was something human in the passage to be gleaned, something human to be gained by our interaction with it, and that the reader would benefit from what was transmitted via that process.

Why work the problem manually?

Why do your own proofreading?

Why write the song?

Create the art?

Make the ad?

Make the movie?

Because ideas are alive, and vitalizing thought only passes from mind to mind. Every “new” idea is dependent upon a spark from a previous mind, from interaction with living content in one of its various forms.

The conversations around the use of AI cannot be reduced to digging a hole with a shovel versus digging it with a backhoe. AI hovers, not ready to be just another labor-saving device but rather a novel human-diminishing tool. The relational and creative aspects of our make-up are core to who we are and shape who we become. We must not outsource the brick and mortar of our personhood and so inadvertently diminish ourselves.

In a strange twist of fate, I believe we will see that what today feels like a giant leap for mankind was really a series of small steps we voluntarily took along the path of educational philosophy. For the last 100 years we have leaned more and more into reductionist approaches to education, ironically, AI may well frame for us a view into a world we collectively refuse to go.

AI just might save education as the mentorship program of personhood, cause us to identify what it means to be human, and motivate us to protect a quiet growing time for those things to root and grow forward.

Of course there is another option, but let’s hope for the best.

Sara Timothy leads Red-Brick Academy and curates its Living Book Library. Her study and purposeful applications of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy have resulted in many ideas and resources for homes and schools. Sara has had the privilege of speaking and writing for many streams within the Charlotte Mason community and was particularly humbled by her visit to Ambleside England to present ideas and techniques at the Centenary Conference. She is passionate about the culture and influence of Miss Mason’s ideas in modern times and works to support those who are cultivating these things in their localities. Her “ABCs of Charlotte Mason” audio blog is hosted by Commonplace Quarterly; resources and her personal blog may be found at stimothyonline.com