Education's Bitter Pill - IV
That education is among the last things to change when our economic, social, political and existential circumstances change might lead us to despair of it ever changing at all, but that would be a mistake born of our predilection for instant rewards.
We have come a long way from the Wackford Squeers world of Dotheby's Hall in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. Yes, until recently at least some educators were still behaving along the same lines, and the persistence of corporal punishment in many parts of the world shows that the lesson has not been learned universally, but for the most part we no longer believe that we have to beat learning into children, or that the default corrective to misbehaviour is yet more physical or mental punishment.
Things do change, even if the timescale is measured in decades and centuries rather than hours and days. But that means that the challenges and opportunities AI presents to education, as to humanity generally, come with an additional twist: they will happen very quickly, so quickly that the lag between the most enlightened of nineteenth-century educators and the present day will seem funereal.
Part of the difficulty - a diminishing part - is that the teaching-profession includes a number of people for whom being a 'source of knowledge' and even some kind of 'guru' is a major motivator. These are the teachers who draw personal job satisfaction from being thought omniscient by juveniles and adolescents. Since nobody knows everything about anything these teachers delude themselves at least as much as they delude their pupils. Probably more.
So now AI "knows everything" instead and "can do everything" instead, but quite obviously it doesn't and can't. AI's supposed-omniscience must not be allowed to replace de facto teacher-omniscience as education replaces one set of chains with another. The very fragility of AI - hallucinations and all that - must engender and inculcate a new context for education: we benefit from the scope of AI's grasp; we are sceptical about the summative accuracy and adequacy of its scope; but we are all-the-better equipped to evaluate any and all claims to knowledge, fact, truth as a result.
In other words, because AI teaches us at a metacognitive level that anything and everything can be fraudulent, bogus, ill-conceived, misconceived or malevolent, we should inculcate in every human child a respectful, cumulative but filtered respect - and disrespect - for any and every kind of 'truth'.
Let us not, nevertheless, domesticate the force and magnitude of the change that AI heralds, in education, and for the world ...
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