AI in schools: opportunity or threat?
School starts again on 1 September in many European countries after the summer holidays. But education is not the same with each passing year, and nowadays the rapid development of artificial intelligence inevitably affects both teachers and pupils. Commentators assess the potential harm and benefits of AI in the classroom, and the tasks now facing educators.
We need post-AI education
Not only teaching itself but also educational goals must be adapted to dealing with AI, writes Boris Walbaum, founder of the private university Forward College, in Les Echos:
“According to Dario Amodei, CEO of AI start-up Anthropic, half of all entry-level skilled jobs could disappear within five years. ... Our education model is not prepared for this. The risk of mass unemployment among young graduates is real in the medium term. ... To prepare them for an uncertain, constantly changing world, we need to do more than adapt education to 'new professions' that are themselves short-lived. We need to invent a post-AI education that gives learners the tools to deal with the uncertainty and acceleration that will characterise the coming decades.”
False friend for lazy thinkers
Sega reflects on the advance of AI into Bulgaria's school system:
“Artificial intelligence has already entered our schools and is beginning to change the way that pupils learn and teachers teach. ... To what extent is the Bulgarian education system prepared to embrace and steer these changes? Will the pupils become consumers of other people's ideas, or will they learn to use these new technologies creatively? ... What AI makes of the pupils will depend on whether we can teach them to use them properly. AI can become a friend or a foe, depending on how it is used. ... It can also produce lazy minds and stupidity.”
Not up to complex educational tasks
AI has limits as a teaching tool, educator Gergely Nádori warns in Telex:
“Knowledge reproduction, tasks that can be solved only in one way, simple summarisation and text comprehension are all things AI can do. But it cannot teach more complex things that it itself doesn't perform well at, such as collaboration, creativity or problem solving. ... Of course, AI tutors can provide assistance in certain areas. They can be useful for practising certain processes and for reproductive learning, but this is at best a building block from which higher-level skills can be developed.”