AI in Education: The Human Element

This is not what I heard from the teachers at Seckinger High. I asked them if they were concerned about A.I. hallucinations or outright cheating with chatbots, which a majority of teenagers say happens regularly at their schools. Beth Cure, who teaches math at Seckinger, said that she thinks her students have an awareness about when A.I. is helpful and when it’s giving them the wrong answers. They can discern, she said, between “when is it something that’s furthering my understanding, or when am I not thinking at all, I’m requiring something else to think for me?”

My time at the Seckinger schools was so brief and highly choreographed that I was not sure I was getting the full picture. So I spent the weeks after I returned from Georgia talking to several recent Seckinger graduates and current parents of students in the cluster.

Nearly all of them mentioned how much they loved the diversity of the schools and the high quality of the teaching staff. But they also told me they did not use as much artificial intelligence as the marketing brochure for the high school might imply.

Joseph Schrage graduated last year from Seckinger High, which he entered as a sophomore. One of the first things he said about his high school experience was that he was in the marching band, and “our football team sucked.”

When I asked him about how much he used artificial intelligence at Seckinger, he said, “In my experience, we would joke a lot about how Seckinger likes to advertise as being an A.I. school.” Mr. Schrage added, “I mean, you’re a New York Times writer and you’re looking at Seckinger. Yeah, it works.”

He talked about the school’s A.I.-specific pathway and said it incorporated the technology much more deeply, as did computer science classes, neither of which was his focus. Holly Hall, who teaches the three-course A.I. pathway, estimated that about 30 current seniors had taken all three classes, though many more take just the first two. The kids have only so much time in the Jenga of their schedules, she said, and many of them are taking dual-enrollment college classes or Advanced Placement courses.

Mr. Schrage said he felt the school taught him how to use A.I. the right way — ethically and functionally. But he was more of a humanities person, and “the pathway I took, realistically, I’m not doing anything more in A.I. than I would be doing anywhere else.” He just finished his freshman year at the University of Georgia, majoring in political science, with plans to go to law school.

Muhammad Rizwan, who graduated from Seckinger in 2024 and goes to Emory University, echoed much of what Mr. Schrage said: There was a lot of A.I. where you would expect it in, say, robotics classes, but not much of it elsewhere. In language-arts classes, he said, teachers made the kids write essays in class by hand to prevent them from cheating by using ChatGPT.

Mr. Rizwan explained that teachers (whom he described as “amazing”) still had to meet the county’s standards, and teachers were supposed to tweak those standards to add an A.I. component. “Would the teachers really follow this? Not really, but was it expected of them? Yes,” said Mr. Rizwan, who is an anthropology and human biology major on the pre-med track. He said some of the teachers seemed almost offended by the incursion of chatbots.

Is there proof that incorporating A.I., even if it is not ubiquitous, is helping prepare Seckinger students for the world? By the county’s own measures, only 38.4 percent of Seckinger graduates are “college ready,” which means they took the ACT and SAT, and met a selected group of benchmarks; an additional 19.4 percent complete a career, technical and agricultural education pathway. Seckinger underperforms other high schools in the county with similar socioeconomic profiles on both metrics.

In fairness to Seckinger, it is new, and since there is no clear definition of A.I. literacy, it would be difficult to independently assess how well versed its graduates are in the technology. When I asked Bernard Watson, the interim chief engagement officer for Gwinnett County schools, about the comparison with other nearby schools, he pointed out that Seckinger’s graduation rate, at over 95 percent, is among the highest in the district, and he said that is an example of strong student engagement.

I also asked why so many students and parents felt there wasn’t very much A.I. in the curriculum when the cluster labels itself as A.I.-focused. “When we talk about being ‘A.I. ready,’ we understand that some may assume we’re just talking about new software or coding. In reality, our focus is much more human. We’re prioritizing ‘durable skills’ that machines can’t replicate — like creative problem solving, ethical thinking and collaborative leadership,” Mr. Watson said in an email. He added that on some days the school may look traditional, but teachers are always looking for new ways to infuse Seckinger’s A.I. framework into their lessons.

As I walked the halls of Seckinger, I thought about my own public high school experience, from 1996 to 2000. That’s when schools were dealing with the dawn of the internet. I reconnected with one of my favorite teachers, John Hackenburg, who started teaching in New York State in 1964 and retired the year that I graduated.

Mr. Hackenburg, who taught social studies, described several different trends that passed through Irvington High School, in the suburbs of New York City, in his decades of work. He started teaching in Irvington in 1972, and he talked about a push for interdisciplinary teaching in the ’70s and ’80s, then a state requirement that every student take an economics class in the late ’80s, and finally, the installation of a computer lab so that students might become computer-literate.

I have one faint recollection of being in the computer lab to work on the student newspaper, but I have no other memories of using a computer in high school. Mostly I used the internet at home, instant messaging my friends on AOL and spending hours on AllMusic looking up indie rock bands. I learned some coding basics working on websites in my early 20s. Those skills are now totally obsolete.

Many of the innovations of Web 1.0 were meant to prepare kids for college and for life, the same pitch for A.I. today, Mr. Hackenburg told me. When I asked him if that’s what he thought school was for, he wrote me a beautiful email: “Every society has a process by which children are nurtured into becoming useful and productive members. Public education is a big part of that in our culture. It gives children the ability to enter in and become part of social institutions with skills to make meaningful contributions for our mutual progress. And to go beyond the provincial and appreciate and engage with the broader world.”

Nurturing from thoughtful, engaged teachers like Mr. Hackenburg seems to be the best part of Seckinger. It is absolutely essential to a good school, and it’s also hard to measure. The parents of current students I spoke to were wild about the staff.

Lydia Clark, who has children at Harmony Elementary, Jones Middle and Seckinger High School, said that “Harmony is the most warm, enveloping culture” and that the teachers at Jones had a “lifelong impact” on her kids. When her child at Seckinger needed an accommodation, it took only a few minutes of speaking to a counselor whom Ms. Clark trusted to set her mind at ease that the problem would be handled. A.I. isn’t the reason her kids are excelling in the classroom, Ms. Clark said. She doesn’t see it much in her children’s education — her high schooler uses the technology sparingly because of A.I.’s impact on the environment — and it isn’t why her family chose the district.

When I first heard about the Seckinger cluster’s focus, I was worried that all of the A.I. would remove the humanity from those schools. But as with the Magna-Tile houses that I watched those sweet-faced first graders making, the earthquake of A.I. cannot ruin the foundation of a solid school, where there is so much else going on: sports and band and A.P. classes and puberty and the messiness of growing up. It’s good that schools are not like start-ups, because children’s minds should not be tied to the whims of the marketplace.

One of the last things I saw at Seckinger High School was a student working in the mechanical engineering classroom. His assignment was to make a carnival game, and he had a bunch of cardboard cutouts in front of him. He told me he was making a giant target that spins, with a laser gun that would shoot the targets. His partner was working on the circuitry.

I asked him if he used A.I. for any of it. No, he said, “I’m just using the human mind.”

- Author: Jessica Grose, The New York Times