AI will Stupefy Our Students Unless... Episode 26
00:00:18 Jon Bergmann: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Or if you're new here, welcome. So I'm hitting the reset button on this podcast. You might remember it as the making mastery learning a reality one day at a time podcast. But I'm planning to shake things up and call it the reach every student podcast. Basically, I want to talk about how we can actually, you know, like reach all of our students in our classrooms. And yeah, I've been around the block for a long time, almost forty years in education, teaching and writing. Most people know me for the whole flip classroom thing, and the twelve books that I wrote. anyway, what I want to do is I want to dive into all sorts of stuff. I want to talk about AI, my own wild classroom stories, where I think education's headed. And I'm gonna bring on some cool people to share their experiences too.
00:01:08 Jon Bergmann: So in today's episode, I'm gonna be a little bleak. Honestly, I've got some serious concerns about AI in the classroom. In fact, I think if we're not careful, AI could stupefy our students, but, but don't worry, I'm not going to leave us hanging. I'm not, I'm not a neophyte or a Luddite, I guess, who says that we shouldn't have AI in the classroom. I do believe there's a place, but I'm going to share the positive side for the next episode. So let's dive into what I am most worried about when we think about AI. Now, when I first started thinking about AI, I became a bit of an enthusiast. For the last year and a half, I have been studying AI and just trying to figure out where it fits in the classroom. Now, no, I am a teacher. I am in my classroom, literally, as we speak. Talking to you and I have been trying out AI tools. Some have been total failures and some have been good. So here's some thoughts. Here's what I really want to say. I am worried that if we are not careful, AI will stupefy our students. Okay. Hear me carefully. I I've done some research. I've done some reading about some different things and Here's a couple of premises. AI is going to continue to get more powerful and it will exceed most of our capabilities, right? Uh, for most of us in our cognitively demanding tasks and. It is going to be really easy for students to take shortcuts to their learning. And if that happens and we don't use AI to push our students, To higher levels, then we could have a detrimental impact on our society. Uh, Hamilton, William and Hattie. So three guys wrote an article or a big long paper. It's like forty pages long. Well worth the read. And, Hattie as in John Hattie, the, the famous, researcher from, Australia or New Zealand, can't remember which, but they said this, they said, but when we see the ever increasing gap between our capabilities and those of machines. It will take gargantuan reserves of willpower and grit to acquire this multidisciplinary learning one step at a time. This brings us back to the what's the point question and risk and reality of mass downgrading of human skills and abilities. So what they're saying in this report is that if we're not careful when students, you see, I teach real kids every day, right? High school students and my students. Who are great, by the way, I love my students. sometimes we'll make the choice to take the easy right road out. And if we, if that is what happens with students over and over and over again, Then they're going to downgrade their human skills and abilities is what Hattie is saying. That scares me, right? Um, I, I am worried that we are going to have this huge change. If you think about this, literacy has been around, Not that long really for like mass literacy was a movement that was established, you know, a few hundred years ago. And before that, there was not mass literacy. And now we're getting to the point where you can just talk to the AI and it will respond back to you. And what will be the need for somebody who is a deep reader? And I'm concerned that that's going to just downgrade human intelligence. So I'm worried about that, um, with students. And I've even seen this with some of my most advanced students who, who will quickly move. To using chat to solve, say, a physics problem. And when they're doing that, what I fear is that they're shortchanging their learning. You see, there is a. There is a productive struggle to learning. That productive struggle is super important that students struggle in their learning. It's okay. I want my students to struggle to a point, but if they too quickly jump, then they have to. Asking AI to help them and my students are like trying to cheat. They're just trying to be efficient with their time. Then maybe they're short changing their learning. They're not, they're not building those synaptic, connections in their brain. One thing that Hattie also talks about in the article or the group, Hattie was one of them, is that there are, they say this, AI is going to take an expert and make them more powerful. It will amplify their work. But if you're working with a novice who uses, AI, what can often happen is it's going to degrade their skills. And me as a high school teacher, I work with novices, right? My students do not know physics. They do not know geology. They don't know chemistry. and my concern is, is my students are going to downgrade their intelligence by over-reliance on AI. One, one person quotes this in the New Yorker, Ted Chiang said this using chat GPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room. You will never improve your cognitive fitness that way. So I'm concerned. About these things that could really cause problems. Another study 2025 by Gerlich says, and this is a summary of the research, the findings reveal a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage And critical thinking abilities mediated by increased cognitive offloading. So in other words, people are offloading their thinking to AI and then their critical thinking skills are diminished. And to continue to quote the study, younger participants, that's the kids I teach, exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. You know, we want to offload things. See, I don't memorize birthdays very well, but I've got a program that reminds me when a birthday is coming up, Google calendar. I mean, so there's some offloading that isn't necessarily a bad thing. But we have to be very careful that, I mean, critical thinking skills. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who works at an accounting firm in New York City, and she's got a big role there. And as they're hiring new, accountants fresh out of college, what she's seeing is that they don't have the critical thinking skills because now they are allowing AI to do a much of the more mundane tasks. But they haven't sort of built up the knowledge to know when the AI is not giving them good results. And so they're missing that critical thinking skills. And she's very concerned about this. We had a fascinating conversation. I also wonder that, and speaking of accounting, that this, this could impact students down the road. If you think about the process, let's say somebody who is And the accounting profession is because I had this conversation with a friend recently in the accounting profession. How, what's your advancement? So, you know, an accountant maybe someday is going to come to the CFO of a company. Well, what's the first job you get? Your first job is to become a beginning accountant and then you learn the ropes, you make some mistakes and then you You know, jump to a little higher level of responsibility and higher and higher and someday you get to the CFO. And so the, the, the pathway to becoming, you know, um, a C-level, Leader in a company may be shortchanged now by AI. That doesn't mean we can't find other paths, and I think we need to, but I'm worried. I'm worried that if we're not careful, again, we could downgrade human intelligence. So we need to be very careful about AI. As I think about my journey in AI in the last year or so, Is at first I was skeptical. I was like, yeah, I'm just not sure about it. I read some stuff. Um, I had a long conversation with, uh, you know, my coauthor, Aaron Sams, many of you know about Aaron and he's got some concerns about AI. And I was like, yeah, I'm there. And then I began to do some research and I started playing with AI. I said, I could see how this could really help. And then this last school year, um, I'm recording this in the spring now. At the beginning of the year, I started deploying AI tutors to my students, and I thought they were going to be really great. And then what I found is that my students would use the AI tutors They would use AI to do the AI tutors. And so they were awful. They weren't, they weren't actually learning the content very well. And I discovered that that was not working. And so, and then as I saw that I began to start doing this research and saying is. Is there something else? So I've become much, much more, uh, cautious. I want to be a cautious AI proponent. I think there is a place for AI. I mean, I'm not a Luddite, like I said a bit before. I know AI is here and it's here to stay and the worst AI that we have The worst AI my students will ever see is the AI that's out today. It's going to get nothing but better from a quality perspective and, and its interface and this kind of a thing. And so I do believe that that's a thing that's going to change the world. But I also don't want the downgrading of human intelligence. I've been an educator for almost four decades. And in those four decades, my goal is to, you know, improve the human condition by creating thoughtful, intelligent, thinking young men and women. And if that's the case, if this is going to have a negative impact, then I'm worried. I mean, some people, as I voice some of these concerns, I've written some articles about this. Um, they've said, well, it's kind of like the calculator, John. you know, when the calculator came, people said that's going to dumb down our math skills or, um, you know, the internet is going to ruin students. You know, I, I'm, I'm all for the calculator. I teach students how to use, I make videos on how to use the calculator. but I think this is different. I feel like this AI thing is just so much bigger. Because it could just, how shall I say this? I have taught students for decades. And as I've taught students for decades, too many of them are too willing to take the easy way out. And so how do we, how do we change this? What, what is the path forward? Well, I'm not going to answer that question today. I'm going to save that for a later date, the next podcast. I want to talk about what I think are the ways that we can rethink education in light of AI. And what the path forward is. So thanks for jumping back in and being willing to listen to my reboot of the podcast. The goal is to reach every student. I want us to reach every student. Every student deserves a quality education. Every student deserves all the opportunities that they need for them to become the successful human, the contributing human to the world that we live in. So thanks for listening. This is John Bergman.
