Some reflections on AI & the present and future education:
Students need to develop two skills that genuinely pull against each other: the ability to use AI well, and the ability to be able to critically think without it. Schools should think about ways to reflect this tension structurally: some assignments where AI is not just allowed but expected, and others where it’s completely off the table.
With a colleague of mine at CMU, we actually ran this as an experiment in our class: let students use AI freely on certain tasks, then brought the experience into the classroom for open discussion. What worked, what felt hollow, where they caught themselves outsourcing thinking they should have done themselves. Those meta-reflections turned into some very interesting conversations I’ve seen in my classrooms. What makes this type of experiment rich, in my view, is the quality of the feedback loop between teachers and students.
We are past the point where students can be meaningfully evaluated only by take-home or open-internet exams “alone”; those formats have been quietly hollowed out.
But we haven’t yet found the Pareto-optimal model for education in the face of advanced AI. What we should do for finding that model is move deliberately in that direction: experimenting, reflecting, adjusting rather than waiting for a universal solution that may not arrive in one piece and for all disciplines.
We need to design learning environments where students are still genuinely being asked to think, and where teachers are close enough to the process to notice when they’re not.
#AI