Parents naturally want what is best for their children, and that concern drives the decisions they make regarding their education. But how do timeless obligations to develop children’s native intelligence interface with new strategic investments in artificial intelligence?
As some schools rush to integrate these new technologies into education and others wait to first assess their fruits, how should parents judge the merits of each approach? Because the full impact of AI on outcomes will not be seen for several years, parents must decide for themselves which option is likely to work best for their own children. In a time of rapid technological innovation, school choice becomes increasingly important.
Education and Technology
To make a principled choice about the presence of AI in the classroom, parents should recall education’s aim: to turn novices slowly and surely into the proficient, one skillset at a time. Students cannot be passive in the process; learning comes only through the student’s own acts of discovery, instigated by their teachers, but accomplished by the students themselves.
State cell phone bans in public schools indicate a growing awareness of the simple fact that not all forms of technology are equally suitable for cultivating a fruitful educational environment. Initial results of these bans indicate that not only are unplugged children less distracted, after an initial adjustment period, they even have fewer absences and do better on standardized tests. These indicate that more interpersonal interactions can have demonstrably positive educational outcomes.
Many contemporary technologies help business productivity by delivering outputs at ever more efficient rates, and AI is understandably touted as a productivity tool. But education has never been about efficiency, precisely because outputs are only indicators of the true goal: formation of students. In education, we grade the product only as a sign of how well students have internalized the subject-matter for themselves. In business, we grade the output on its own. Thus, the aims of these two human enterprises, business and education, diverge in principle.
Cultivating Natural Intelligence
Because the stakes are so high, many parents will likely decide to be hardnosed pragmatists about education, and they will hold fast to what they know works: Traditional, in-person, teacher-led classroom experiences are powerful ways to induce students to learn. Teachers can inspire excellence, unpack concepts, and exercise judgment concerning when to help and equally importantly, when not to. The art of the teacher is to foster the student’s freedom of independent thought, and the ability to navigate the give and take of real-world social interactions is a key human excellence. No machine can substitute for the individual educational development of each human person.
Education offers the gift of liberty to students—liberty won through an understanding of the good that is rooted in the true—and this gift is the necessary condition for thoughtful citizenship and productive employment. As citizens, graduates cannot look to algorithms as sources of political wisdom, and, as workers, they cannot be mere users of devices. Instead, they need to be able to understand the common good for themselves and know how to guide technology in creative and beneficial ways.
Letting Parents Decide What’s Best for their Children
Given the obligation that parents have to their children, and given the experimental character of AI and other such technologies, it is not unreasonable to allow parents to choose traditional modalities when considering the individual needs of their own children, for they are not so much choosing against something as choosing for something, the enduring goals of independent thought, liberty, and real fellowship.
For these reasons, the “school choice” conversation would do well to expand to include not only differing educational models, whether classical, STEM-focused, or other approaches, but also the choice of education’s mode of delivery, whether technologically maximalist or traditionally interpersonal. In some cases, demand will grow for schools that closely integrate AI in every subject. In others, demand will grow for schools that serve families who prefer the opposite strategy. This market flexibility is the greatest strength of school choice.
Whatever they decide about the new technologies, parents should have the ability to give the gift of educated liberty to their children. This privilege must not be limited to families who can afford the significant expense of private education but should be available to all. Otherwise, the republic and its economy will pay the price. More importantly, so will the next generation of Americans.
Chad Engelland, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas and author of many books, including Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind and Phenomenology, both from The MIT Press.