It is time to be brutally honest about AI in education, especially now that the race is on among tech companies to secure lucrative relationships with schools. As indicated by a recent New York Times article, educational AI is shaping up to be big business. Powerful forces are plowing full steam ahead to implement AI into the earliest stages of learning in a woefully uncritical way. One wonders if anyone has consulted those who should know best about the effects of AI on the minds of our students: the teachers.
The commonly held belief that AI is a critical tool for enhancing and expanding student efforts proves facile and misleading, as it fails to resonate with teachers, particularly in the humanities. Conditioning students to consult artificial sources of information gathering and analysis is antithetical to training them to follow the questions generated by actual experience and attempt to square their suppositions with reality. Far from offering support in education, the truth is that AI has destroyed any semblance of academic integrity, shaken students' confidence in their own intellectual abilities, and hindered their creativity and imagination.
These concerns reflect much more than the perennial complaints of educators about troubling trends among the current student population. In fact, teachers are witnessing an entirely new crisis in education, one with far-reaching effects that threaten to compromise one of the very things that make human beings, well, human. The reality is that, slowly and quietly, AI is simultaneously supplanting and corroding the distinctive capacities of the human being: to read and to think about what one reads; to express ideas in writing and the arts; and to cultivate fruitful relationships that pursue such activities as a community.
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