Baldur Bjarnason shared an article in a recent edition of his newsletter about AI in education. As a parent of an 8-year-old, this is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like most other parents I’ve encountered, I find the idea that teachers can be “replaced” by AI so preposterous that I’d imagine no one who’s ever had a child, met a child, or even been a child would take it seriously. Apparently though, there are some for whom the idea of taking an immeasurably complex, still-forming, constantly changing human brain, understanding, caring for and nurturing it, and imbuing it with the wisdom of the universe in a way that inspires excitement, passion and curiosity are the kind of tasks that should be done by a computer. Go figure.
Like just about every other profession, much has been made of AI “helping” teachers. Indeed, some teachers I know turn to ChatGPT to help plan lessons. They’re also forced to sift through pages of homework done by ChatGPT, and have developed their own methods for detecting plagiarism (i.e. when text has been lifted wholesale from an LLM). No, they don’t use an AI “plagiarism detector”, they use their own human brains.
Part of the reason teachers turn to tools like ChatGPT for help is because their own workloads are unmanageable, and only ever seem to increase. So too, it seems, does the work of parents. A few weeks ago I spent an evening with several mums with school-age children. At one point the talk turned to homework, and the constant battle to stay on top of it, which is made far harder by the plethora of apps schools now use to issue homework, and which in many cases children are required to use to complete it. At last count, my friend was aware of at least seven different apps her Year 7 daughter needs to use. That’s seven different log-ins to keep track of. My friend described having to “hack into” her daughter’s tablet when she’d forgotten her device password.
Among all these apps there’s no central place where she can see, at a glance, all of her homework requirements for the week. And that’s even when apps work at all: sometimes my friend will log in and see nothing, even when she knows that homework has been issued. I heard stories of children automatically (automatically!!) being issued with double-detentions because the software failed to register that they’d turned up for the first detention — a detention issued for failing to complete homework they didn’t realise they had.
All this seems incredibly stressful and cruel for children who are navigating their first year of secondary school, and that’s with supportive, tech-literate parents. Children with a less stable home life will undoubtedly have to deal with even more stress around this.
As my child is still at primary school, I count myself lucky I’ve only had to deal with a couple of apps, and they’re not usually compulsory. Each year we’re issued with a login for a new maths app and without fail, the following year it’s been abandoned in favour of another. Last year’s web app didn’t work with touch devices, which seems like an oversight: how many 7-years-olds are sitting at a laptop?
I’m sure many schools are handling technology better than my friend’s child’s. And I’m sure the teachers and school leaders foisting more technology onto children are doing it with the best of intentions — perhaps out of fear of failing children, who need to be equipped with vital digital skills, or (perhaps disingenuously) fear that their school won’t appear “forward-looking” enough. I absolutely advocate for children learning tech literacy skills at an early age — they’re essential for navigating the world, after all. Unfortunately many schools are ill-equipped to teach those skills, whether that’s through lack of funding or lack of qualified staff. But handing that task over to an AI is far from the answer.