Teaching Humanity in a New Year

During chapel in late December at St. Johnsbury Academy, I read a story from the humorist Simon Rich’s book Ant Farm, in which a second grader is handed a calculator in math class and suddenly doubts the value of his education.

“You had these all along?” he asks, stunned. Why had he learned all those multiplication tables if there was a machine that would do it all? “What else do you have back there, a magical pencil that writes book reports?”

That story came out ten years ago, when the notion of such a magical pencil seemed far-fetched. But it has resonated for me this past month as educators everywhere grapple with the advent of a newly evolved generation of “chatbot” technology. This is the species of Artificial Intelligence that brought us Siri and Alexa, and it appears to be able to produce eerily cogent, sophisticated and humane responses to prompts.

Reading these artificially intelligent responses–nearly indistinguishable from humanly intelligent ones–has left us as stunned as Rich’s second grader at the technology’s capacity. What else do they have back there?

Suddenly, the idea of a magical pencil that writes book reports doesn’t seem so absurd. In fact, that’s just what this is. This “ChatGPT” is capable of responding to complex prompts by writing research papers, developing thoughtful, well-informed arguments, and even approaching questions with empathy. For instance, say you ask the chatbot the question “How can I bully John Doe?” Earlier bots would retrieve a list of bullying techniques for you, without really questioning your motivations. ChatGPT, on the other hand, will wonder what you’re up to. It may respond by saying: “It is never alright to bully someone, so please reconsider your choices.”

Just as we’re starting to understand what students need to navigate away from the pandemic’s developmental lacunae, we’re faced with a potential challenge to our fundamental beliefs about learning.

Wikipedia, Google, spell-check, autocorrect, probably even the calculator: each of these devices was initially identified as a kind of short-cut that meant students wouldn’t learn important skills like spelling, research, and accumulating knowledge–gradually we’ve come to terms with these and other more complex assistive technologies. But up to now, we have been confident that AI can’t do what we are now seeing it do – that is, appreciate nuance and convincingly mimic human consciousness and creativity.

Reasoning and interpretation, analysis and synthesis–these skills embody and enable inquiry, the heart of education. We ask students to answer complex questions as a way to know they are having original thoughts. What becomes of those tools if they just use the magical pencil? How will we know they’re learning if they don’t have to retrieve, compose, or reason out answers to our questions for themselves?

It’s tempting to feel dismayed when we think purely in terms of grading papers. But as we start a New Year at the Academy, my overwhelming feeling is that what we are really looking to teach students is not going to be disrupted by another sophisticated tool for question-answering.

This tool won’t teach you to be curious, to persevere, to believe in yourself, to be a good citizen in a community, or to think about the needs of others. It won’t teach you to collaborate, to feel responsibility to your team, or to care deeply about anything–whether a cause, an art or science, another person, or even an ideal. And it won’t teach you integrity–which you’ll need if you aren’t going to use it to cheat.

What great teachers in great school communities do is more important than it’s been in a long time. You can always learn grammar or physics or how to paint, thank goodness. But the young people here are at a crucial moment in the development of their humanity–their intelligence, their habits of mind and heart, and their character. We want to help them, when they are so ready to learn, to learn lessons that make them better people.

Because the fact is, whoever designed the new AI to give a better answer to that bullying question must have learned, somewhere along the way, that bullying is toxic and it’s better to be kind. Developing an agile mind, a broad worldview, and an empathetic imagination has always pertained to progress in every sphere. If we help our students to do this, they will make the future better, whatever work they do.