I recently watched a social media video post from a teacher, and it stung me, so I transcribe it for you here, verbatim:
New pedagogical idea: stop teaching kids to add. Seriously. AI handles all the arithmetic and perfect grammar instantly. We need to focus on what humans do best. We taught everyone to drive, not to shoe a horse. AI is the new car. The kids aren’t wrong, our curriculum is simply ancient. The new essential skill is interpreting the data AI provides. It is critical synthesis of information. We must prioritize prompt engineering, the art of speaking to the machine as the new literacy. Teach them to be the conductor who directs the output. Once they are engaged in creating complex systems, running a business, or building an app, they will naturally choose to specialize, and master the deep math or rhetoric needed for innovation. They’ll learn it. Learning foundational skills then becomes a personally motivated specialization, not mandatory homework. Maybe the kids aren’t alright. Maybe they’re just waiting for us to catch up to the future.
I commented: “Is this satire?” His response: “No. I am a real teacher, and these are my views.”
Unfortunately, he is not alone in his opinion. Many modern educators express similar ideas, and many schools are careening down this slippery silicon path while not asking some very basic questions about what human cognition truly is and what may happen when we outsource our thinking en masse.
The old idea that we all need to learn the three Rs, “readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic” (painfully forced alliteration though it may be), has roots deep in our understanding of what enables constructive thinking. The ancients valued the skills of literacy and numeracy not merely for their practical applications but as the foundation for the liberal arts—or what we might call the liberating arts.
People who assume that learning vocabulary and grammar is merely an academic exercise and will be unnecessary if we have machines that can create perfectly correct prose are entirely blind to the reality that commanding words and syntax is deeply personal and crucial to our intellectual life. Understanding grammar is not just for being able to write and proofread one’s own emails; it actually provides the tools for thinking and comprehending. Confucius observed this (around 2500 years ago):
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if morals and art deteriorate, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
While the ancient Chinese philosopher was perhaps concerned mostly with political and social health, there are personal implications. Our use of language is deeply connected with our rational thought, which is a distinctly human faculty. Vocabulary and grammar are what allow us to articulate and share ideas, experiences, even feelings, inspirations and intuitions. While large language model AI agents may be able to collect and synthesize information in a very efficient way, they cannot know what it is to be human, they cannot feel, they cannot express a human nature. To embrace a new pedagogical idea that minimizes our capacity for distinctly human thought and communication isn’t just a bad idea, it seems almost criminal—educational neglect at its worst.
Another video that concerned me was of a teacher who reported that one of her fifth grade students asked, “Why do I have to learn to read? My computer reads everything for me.” Now, while I am a big fan of audiobooks, especially for the dyslexic kids out there, this is a statement different in kind; here we have a child who has come to believe that reading is not worth the effort. What then will her computer read for her? Will her life become about asking AI to read something and then summarize it, even telling her what she should think about it? Sadly, it seems that this is already happening as we increasingly hear teachers bemoaning their experience of students turning in AI-generated papers but having little or no concept of what ideas those papers contain or, worse, believing that those ideas were indeed their own reflections on whatever book or source of information the AI used to generate the text. They are outsourcing their thinking, and the result is likely to be intellectual malnutrition.
Human beings can survive—for a time—on highly processed sustenance provided by an intravenous drip or a feeding tube, but we all know that our brains and bodies grow and function best on a diet of natural, whole, minimally processed foods. Furthermore, we need a balance of macro- and micronutrients to optimize brain and body. Many in the medical world are finally starting to understand and teach that health is achieved not by alleviating symptoms with medicines but by improving and maintaining diet, exercise, sleep, and lifestyle, which can often reverse diseases entirely, restoring energy, vitality, and overall wellbeing.
Just as our bodies require a healthy metabolism to transform the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats into strong muscles and bones, healthy blood, and organs, we need the basic skills of reading, writing, and calculating to be able process the ideas and information in the world around us into helpful thinking and a healthy intellectual life.
And it seems that our modern world makes both physical and intellectual health more difficult because both “junk food” and “junk information” have become not only ubiquitous but unavoidable. A soda and some fries won’t kill us overnight, but an exclusive diet of such will inevitably lead to degenerative disease. It’s the same thing with what we take in through our eyes and ears. As I have spoken about repeatedly for the last two decades, what we read, what we hear, what we commit to memory will be how we furnish our minds, and as teachers and parents we have a great responsibility to cultivate healthy appetites in our students. As we read to them—and with them—good, true, and beautiful literature, they will grow in their taste for such in their own reading. We must help them learn to feed their minds well even as we lead them to make better health habits and food choices. The analogy holds.
But what scares me more than the “junk” we consume is what will happen if we just totally outsource our thinking. If we, as a society, don’t learn addition and multiplication, how can we even conceptualize quantity; all numbers become meaningless (think about trillion). If we don’t learn to read complex text and discuss it, we will only be able to understand simplistic ideas (think about modern election debates). If we default to allowing soulless AI agents to write everything we want to communicate, we will soon be only exchanging soullessness. Our very humanity is at risk.
And, I know you know this. I’m preaching to the choir, but sometimes even the choir needs to have the truth presented again amid the confusion and chaos of untethered postmodern, even post-human propaganda. We will not stop in our mission to bring this truth to all parents and families, teachers and schools. We must not think that we teach children to listen, speak, read, and write because it is useful in a merely practical sense. These are the basic skills that have always been known—and will continue—to cultivate better thinking and hopefully wiser and more virtuous people.
