AI has Educators Polarized

The adversarial assumption vs. the cooperative assumption

Henry Shevlin says,

if you want to give an example of a single sector in which AI has had devastating effects—some positive, but mostly negative, devastating effects—it’s education. This is one of my go-to responses when people try to push the “AI as a nothing burger” take. I say, “Go speak to a high school teacher. Tell them AI’s nonsense, just a nothing burger.” Their daily lives and their interactions with students and the way they can teach has been utterly transformed in mostly negative ways so far by AI.

He also says,

I think AI in general, but LLMs specifically, are just amazingly well suited to serve as tutors and to buttress learning. …if it’s just a matter of having someone deal with students’ individual learning needs, work through their specific problems, figure out exactly what they’re misunderstanding and where they need help, there’s no reason a sufficiently fine-tuned LLM couldn’t do that.

I keep coming across strong opinions about what AI will do to education. The enthusiasts claim that AI is a boon. The critics warn that AI is a disaster.

It occurs to me that there is a simple way to explain these extreme views. Your prediction about the effect of AI on education depends on whether you see teaching as an adversarial process or as a cooperative process. In an adversarial process, the student is resistant to learning, and the teacher needs to work against that. In a cooperative process, the student is curious and self-motivated, and the teacher is working with that.

If you make the adversarial assumption, you operate on the basis that students prefer not to put effort into learning. Your job is to overcome resistance. You try to convince them that learning will be less painful and more fun than they expect. You rely on motivational rewards and punishments. Soft rewards include praise. Hard rewards include grades.

If you make the cooperative assumption, you operate on the basis that students are curious and want to learn. Your job is to be their guide on their journey to obtain knowledge. You suggest the next milestone and provide helpful hints for how to reach it.

Under the adversarial assumption, AI is a disaster. By quickly finding and summarizing information, it deceives students into believing that they can learn without effort. By writing essays for students, it facilitates students deceiving teachers, making it more difficult for teachers to correctly reward student effort.

Under the cooperative assumption, AI is a godsend. Unlike a teacher with a class of a couple dozen students, an AI can act as a personal tutor. It can provide the student with exactly the information and exercises that he needs, given his current level of understanding.

My impression of the Alpha School is that it makes both assumptions. It makes heavy use of AI to provide personalized instruction. But it also pays close attention to motivation. Students who focus on learning are awarded more time to do things that they enjoy. They also receive small material rewards. Students are watched by both computers and humans to see if they are going off track, in which case humans intervene.

I think that educators who just reject AI out of hand are too committed to the adversarial assumption. They should broaden their thinking to incorporate the cooperative assumption. To the extent that the adversarial assumption is valid, you do have to change practices to overcome the threats posed by AI. But you also should be exploring the opportunities that AI makes available.

substacks referenced above:

@

AI Sessions #5: How AI Broke Education