A.I. IN SCHOOL: A PATCHWORK OF POLICIES

 

Amid the uncertainty, some countries are temporarily barring classroom chatbot use for students. Norway, for instance, has curbed student access to A.I. in elementary and middle schools. New York City, the largest U.S. school district, just announced a one-year ban on student A.I. use in elementary and middle schools.

Other school systems are studying the potential benefits and drawbacks of A.I. for students and teachers.

Iceland started a pilot program last fall in which teachers used chatbots like Claude, from Anthropic, to help brainstorm ideas for new lessons, create learning games and help explain complex concepts to students.

In Sierra Leone, Google recently conducted an eight-week study with local schools to test whether its “guided learning” A.I. system could help students with math. The company reported that its short study had found modest gains. Google also noted that students who already had strong math skills benefited more from using A.I. than students who were struggling.

Estonia, one of the first countries to provide computers to students in schools, has embarked on a more comprehensive program. Last year, researchers and education leaders there worked with OpenAI to develop a customized chatbot in Estonian that is designed to ask students questions and push them to think for themselves, rather than do students’ work for them.

“The idea is to create guardrails to make sure that students are not losing their cognitive skills in the age of A.I.,” Kristina Kallas, Estonia’s minister of education and research, told me.

Countries and school districts that are incorporating A.I. into classrooms note that many students are already using commercial chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT on their own for help with their schoolwork. They argue that schools have an important role to play in training students and providing guidelines on how to use A.I. productively. Otherwise, they say, Silicon Valley will set the rules.

Tech values vs. education values

The fight over A.I. in education is ultimately a clash of values.

Tech giants, which have a financial duty to shareholders, want to train schoolchildren to use their products. Those business imperatives have helped fuel an industry-backed drive for A.I. education that has focused largely on teaching students to use chatbots and vet their outputs.

Public schools, in contrast, are government institutions whose mission is to serve the best interest of children. To do that, global groups like UNESCO, the U.N.’s agency for education, are urging schools to take a more human-centered approach to A.I. education — one that is less focused on how to use chatbots, and more focused on teaching kids about where A.I. products come from, how they work and how they are upending humanity.

“It’s not about how to use an A.I. chatbot,” Mark West, an education specialist at UNESCO, told me. “It’s: ‘What are A.I. chatbots?’ and ‘What are they doing to us?’”

As Silicon Valley drives schools to adopt A.I., it may be as important — or even more important — to teach students how A.I. is driving us.

- Author: Katrin Bennhold, The New York Times

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