Has AI (Really) Broken High School?

"We can panic about the future of education or we can do it better."

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“AI Has Broken High School and College”, no doubt a click-baity title. But as any teacher right now will tell you, something has fundamentally shifted in education in the last few years. We’re heading into the school year that will graduate, at both HS and university levels, the first AI-generation. These are students that have had access to ChatGPT since its launch in November of 2022. By every report, they’re using it for everything. For assignments (ranging from brainstorm and feedback to full-out “I didn’t read a word of this before submission”), for how-tos, for advice and even for companionship. Education is having a moment of reckoning, no doubt.  

But we’ve also known this for a while. And we’ve heard countless educators articulate in different ways. “We’re educating students for a world that no longer exists”, “the jobs of tomorrow don’t yet exist today”, “Students need skills, not facts”, “This needs to have real-world application”. All these express some sort of educational existential dread - “What if we’re doing the wrong thing?” 

The interviewee, Ian Bogost (a university professor) refers to this as "pedagogical debt”, the idea that we built systems that were flawed knowing they were imperfect. But without the time or energy to correct them in the moment we had to carry that debt forward. And AI has come to collect that debt. Many of our instructional strategies and assessment tools were outdated before AI, but AI has brought that into sharp relief. 

Students are noticing, and beginning to demand more. And this doesn’t mean “a return to the classics where everyone writes essays in cursive” as so many are quick to facetiously suggest when dismissing the challenges of AI. University student Harrison Lieber argues that education needs to “emulate the real world” and suggests a heightened focus on project-based learning.  I believe he’s right and believe we’re on the precipice of students (and parents and teachers) demanding something different from their education systems, something that helps them pay off this debt they’ve inherited from generations back. 

We can panic about the future of education or we can do it better. I’ve spent 20 years in education, and almost everything I did for the first 14 can be replicated with AI in minutes. But the time I spent in PBL programs requires skills that are uniquely human. Students create visions together, build consensus, navigate conflict, challenge their own ideas and assumptions and don’t just “emulate the real world”, but interact with it and learn from it. If your school isn’t asking “how do we redesign our whole approach” during the now inevitable AI conversations, you’re missing a huge opportunity and might already be behind in delivering what students need.