“We’re running out of money, but we have to keep the kids up with the times.”
That’s what I heard from my neighbor about teaching AI in schools. He’s the superintendent over a neighboring district.
Because yes, every age has its pressures to keep kids up with the times. It opens opportunities for them to enter the workforce. We want them to have the skills to go as far as they can.
That’s been the impetus behind the STEAM focus of the last decade. We just changed the name because the technology changed. The focus and the intent are the same.
But what if that focus is eating its own opportunities? And what does that mean for homeschooling families?
Old Movies
Think back to the movie Limitless.
Bradley Cooper’s character receives pills from his girlfriend’s brother, takes one, and all the friction in his life disappears for a few hours.
But it doesn’t work for everyone.
Later in the movie, the brother muses, “I guess you have to be smart for them to work.”
That was the message from 15 years ago. A warning to upgrade your operating system.
Because processing garbage faster doesn’t produce gold. It takes effort, iteration, and experience to apply what you’ve learned.
For kids who have yet to learn anything, the thought of pushing AI on them earlier concerns me.
Research shows…
And it’s showing up in the results.
At a talk at Notre Dame last month, professors Vamsi Kanuri and Nick Berente explored why AI hasn’t unleashed productivity as promised. Research they found estimated companies realize gains of only 11%.
That’s after the billions of dollars companies were expected to spend on tokens.
But it also leaves the question: Why?
What you learn matters
Here’s my simple explanation: Garbage in, garbage out.
That same system that prioritizes job-preparedness sold students a college pathway instead of getting a job after high school. Regardless of ability or ambition, getting a degree was the way to higher income versus a diploma alone.
Except that wasn’t a guarantee. There were minimum requirements we should have upheld.
On the front end, that’s meant remedial courses at levels as low as middle school. In the middle, more people in the pipeline has skyrocketed the cost of tuition.
And on the back end, there are more unqualified graduates who can’t take on the opportunities they were promised.
Start at the beginning?
So if something is broken at the corporate level, and the secondary education layer, what good will it do to push AI on kids who start out not knowing anything?
In short, we shouldn’t. Especially for those of us educating our own kids.
This is where traditional classical education will shine brighter. Because learning how to prompt AI means nothing if you don’t know what to look for in the response.
Technology has always been a tool to implement knowledge faster. But going faster without knowing what should come from the journey is a recipe for getting lost.
Back to basics
As tempting as it is to push knowing advanced topics farther down in a kid’s development…
As much as we’d love them to have more opportunities than we did…
As worried as we are about them getting left behind…
It’s overblown.
Because adults who don’t know are settling for accommodating romantic partners that won’t help them grow. Or being led to insane asylums on the belief they can transcend physics in this life.
Why push that on kids?
Instead, make sure they have the basic skills to make sense of what AI spits out. As boring as it sounds, getting them to understand core subjects by hand still matters.
Maybe more than it ever has.
Affiliate corner
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