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    [With a lot of local school systems going to using packaged, online/   
   computerized lesson applications, I wonder if this isn't already   
   happening? -- Mike]   
      
   AI doesn't belong in the classroom unless you want kids to learn all the    
   wrong lessons   
      
   Date:   
   Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:11:27 +0000   
      
   Description:   
   More and more teachers are using AI to teach, and this is probably the last   
   thing we want.   
      
   FULL STORY   
   ======================================================================   
      
   As a child, I loved fingerpainting and anxiously awaited the weekly, colorful   
   in-class activity. It wasn't so much the art that compelled me; I loved the   
   distinctive smell and visceral feel of the fingerpaint. The entire process   
   felt like an exploration, and through it, I discovered my creativity.    
      
   It was messy, chaotic, and crucial, I think, for my development. The new idea   
   with fingerpainting is to separate a child's fingers from the paint. You   
   splash some of the squishy colors onto a canvas, then seal the goop under   
   plastic. The child then basically pushes the colors around without actually   
   touching them.    
      
   It's clean, antiseptic, terrible, and a metaphor for what I think AI might be   
   doing to learning.    
      
   My concerns were sparked anew by a recent and well-researched story in USA   
   Today explaining "How AI is affecting the way kids learn to read and write ."    
      
   It's full of details and anecdotes about how teachers are turning to AI in    
   the classroom to help students, for instance, ideate. One teacher complained   
   that the kids' essay ideas were growing "stale," so she's having them use AI   
   to help them come up with better ones.   
      
   Antiseptic AI learning    
      
   Forget brainstorming in the classroom, kicking around ideas big and small    
   that might spark others. AI offers a valuable shortcut. It also cuts out the   
   messiness of bad ideas. AI's job is not to come up with answers randomly. The   
   Large Language Models (LLMs) in ChatGPT , for instance, have been trained on   
   millions, if not billions, of parameters to have a better understanding of a   
   broad range of topics.    
      
   I often describe this as AI's knowing better than us "what comes next." That   
   works in reading, writing, coding, and art. It's not always a clean process,   
   though.    
      
   Early AIs (ones from 12 months ago) with somewhat limited training didn't   
   always understand that humans have five fingers on each hand, so we got six   
   fingers and sometimes extra phantom limbs. Interestingly, we seem quite   
   comfortable with AI's learning through their own messy mistakes.    
      
   Literacy, the report notes, is dropping among grade school children largely   
   because they're doing less reading of long-form content  they mostly read   
   stuff on small screens if they're not ingesting endless video scrolls  and    
   the pandemic set almost all learning back by a few years.   
      
   Educators struggle with this and AI has arrived as a handy tool for   
   navigating around many of these issues.    
      
   Students are also engaging in more back-and-forth with AI for research. While   
   boomers and Gen X might have used encyclopedias, Millennials and Gen Z have   
   largely grown up using the web as a core research tool. They learned how to   
   search on Google and, through trial and error, find the details they needed.    
      
   AI, though, is a conversation where the response is presented as fact, and    
   the student assumes it is so. There is no error or assumption of error, and   
   mistakes could easily be hidden in AI hallucinations.    
      
   Again, the engagement with a teacher and even other students is lost. Ideas    
   no longer float in the ether. Questions are not shared among a group.   
      
   Let's make mistakes   
      
   Good teachers used to say, "There's no such thing as a dumb question." Asking   
   "dumb" questions was how we learned. Students using AI are shielded from that   
   moment. They just type in the prompt and the AI responds.    
      
   We learn through trial and error, and studies have shown that young minds, in   
   particular, need to learn from the messiness of mistakes.    
      
   In a 2016 study, Learning from Errors , researchers wrote, "Although error   
   avoidance during learning appears to be the rule in American classrooms,   
   laboratory studies suggest that it may be a counterproductive strategy, at   
   least for neurologically typical students. Experimental investigations   
   indicate that errorful learning followed by corrective feedback is beneficial   
   to learning."    
      
   A world in which students are potentially paired with their own AI chatbot    
   and self-navigate without any experimentation or flat-out mistakes means that   
   the conversation about why the work was wrong will never happen.    
      
   There is an exploration lost for the student who will not learn about the   
   right way and understand how that error might lead to other reasoning dead   
   ends and for the teacher who will fail to learn about the best way to engage   
   and teach that student.    
      
   The sad thing is that I'm not sure we can convince students and their parents   
   that this lack of messiness, error-making, and feedback loops will harm the   
   students.    
      
   Outside the classroom, students teach themselves how to use ChatGPT to    
   produce essays and get the best results and grades. At least educators are    
   hip to these efforts. In the USA Today story, one educator who discovered    
   them began running all the essays through AI checkers. Those are, of course,   
   not fool proof .    
      
   The sad thing is that I'm not sure we can convince students and their parents   
   that this lack of messiness, error-making, and feedback loops will harm the   
   students. They will not learn as much, and I'm pretty sure their intellectual   
   curiosity and creativity will be stunted.    
      
   How do we learn fresh things when our teacher is an AI, one that's been   
   trained on all that was and is still not that good at telling us what comes   
   next?    
      
   Look, I am not anti-AI, but AI in the hands of children and young students is   
   like the sealed fingerpainting kit: antiseptic, wrong, and the opposite of    
   the beautiful mess that is learning.   
      
   ======================================================================   
   Link to news story:   
   https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/ai-doesnt-belong-i   
   n-the-classroom-unless-you-want-kids-to-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons   
      
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