With Utah’s tech sector growing in size and influence, it is time that our K-12 public school system adopts a vision for the role AI will play — or won’t — in our children’s education.
Do we imagine students succeeding by interacting with chatbots as tutors? Do we think AI robots will replace humans as teachers?
If so, we’re on the wrong track. AI will never be able to replace the role of humans in education.
At the core of growth and learning is the necessity of doing hard things: grappling with a new math concept, challenging our physical limits in athletics, interpreting a difficult novel or expressing ideas in clear and coherent paragraphs.
From slot machines to social media, software excels at getting us to do easy things—to the point of addiction—but what motivates humans to do the difficult work central to growth? It is responsible agents who care about us, have expectations of us and have moral authority. Robots are none of these things.
Most students tire of chatbots, and robots will never command their respect. Utah should acknowledge this reality and embrace AI as an opportunity not to improve education directly but to do three things that will help students indirectly.
How AI can help education
First, AI can make our teachers’ lives easier. In addition to the potential to assist with secretarial tasks, lesson preparation and data analysis, AI will soon enable teachers to assign more paper-based work.
Research indicates that screen-based learning is not very effective, but handwritten work is. The physical experience of handwriting and the muscle movement involved engage more of the brain and lead to deeper learning. With AI quickly gaining the capacity to evaluate paper-based student work — which should always be done with human oversight — teachers will not have to choose between the convenience of auto-grading on digital platforms and what is best for students, which is more often than not old-fashioned working by hand.
Second, AI’s macroeconomic effects may offer the opportunity to invest needed resources into education. AI offers the prospect of increasing productivity while causing layoffs in some industries. We face the possibility of both higher tax revenues and higher unemployment.
What should we do with this potential “excess” tax revenue and human capacity? I believe they are both desperately needed in education. Few people outside the education sector appreciate just how stretched thin faculty and staff are.
Despite very helpful budget increases in recent years, Utah’s schools are still understaffed compared to other states and to the highest-performing nations. Where most Utah teachers spend more than half of duty hours directly teaching students, teachers in the highest-achieving countries, from South Korea to Finland, typically spend less than half of their workday directly teaching students, using the remainder of their time to evaluate student work, analyze data, plan, collaborate with colleagues, communicate with parents, conduct research and learn.
To gain parity with top-performing countries, we need more people working in our schools. Education is meaningful work that more people would love to participate in. If AI frees up more workers, let’s direct funding to schools to hire them.
Finally, there is a place for students to interact directly with AI, but it is not via consumer chatbots like ChatGPT. While some basic understanding of chatbots and prompting techniques is useful, our primary goal should be to teach students how to become AI engineers.
At Monticello Academy, the charter network that I lead, with the support of a K-12 Computer Science for Utah Special Projects Grant, we are doing just that. By starting small and using Application Program Interfaces (APIs), students are learning how to create and use AI systems to solve deeper problems than “What’s a good caption for this selfie?”
The future will belong to those who know how to unlock AI’s potential to solve complex human challenges. This will involve integrating AI into multifaceted software and computational systems. Rather than using AI merely as a passive consumer product, our students are learning to do just that.
The flashiest uses of AI in education — chatbot tutors, screen-based learning platforms and AI teachers — will mostly be dead ends. Utah should take the lead in adopting a more human-centered approach to maximizing what AI can offer for human flourishing.