What is the purpose of education?

I was thinking about this recently as I was grading a stack of research papers written, to varying extents, by my ninth graders and ChatGPT.

I ask out of despair. It’s frustrating having to spend a lot of time on a task that students did not spend much time on at all. The advent and accessibility of artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how we challenge students and assess their learning. It’s a problem teachers everywhere are scrambling to navigate.

Some teachers take a proactive approach and teach students to use AI as a tool that simplifies the grunt work but still requires real thinking to use, like a calculator. Some use heavy-handed consequences as fear tactics to try to dissuade students from using it. Others, including myself, try to design the curriculum to be as un-ChatGPTable as possible: having students create physical objects, do presentations or handwrite papers.

But each of those approaches is problematic. It’s nearly impossible to make an entire year’s worth of material that is completely analog, and a lot of student handwriting is illegible — not to mention the challenges and potential Individuals with Disabilities Education Act violations it poses for students with disabilities. 

Bringing the hammer down on kids caught cheating sounds simple enough, and there will always be students who will take pride in their own work and/or be intimidated by potential consequences, but it’s not as easy as it might seem to prove a student used AI to cheat.

AI detection software is helpful but unreliable, and there are pretty obvious ways to sidestep apps that show revision history on documents. In both my experience and that of other teachers I’ve talked to, schools can’t do much if students and their parents double-down enough on their claims that they didn’t cheat, no matter the evidence.

(This seems to be the culture we’ve created for ourselves; you may be able to think of a public figure or two who have doubled-down on lies through exhaustive evidence, and have been extravagantly rewarded for it.) 

And even if you teach students how to use AI as a tool — which strikes me as the most correct approach — doing so also helps them learn how to cover their tracks better, and they really don’t have any incentive to use it to help them instead of do their work for them.

Can Learning Be Its Own Reward?

Which brings us back to my original question: What is all this even for? There are a number of different teacherly responses.

Some use real-world examples to debunk the idea that you don’t need … (insert whichever subject area you like). “You don’t know your future,” the Good Teacher says. “What if you become an engineer, or an archeologist, or a doctor or a journalist? Then you will need to know math or history or science or English!” 

That’s true, sure, but it’s hardly convincing, especially for the kinds of kids who ask that question in the first place. 

Recently math teacher/influencer Zander Epps offered an answer by using unit rate in the wild, to help him decide which pack of Takis to buy, ignoring the fact that the price-per-unit is almost always included on the price tag. Said differently, the math is already done for you — perhaps by ChatGPT, who knows — so what’s the difference if you use AI to do the work for you in school, too?

When I taught math — the subject that most frequently elicits this question — my response was that yes, most of us won’t need to know how to find the area of a circle in our adult lives, but learning how to do these things trains us how to think and solve problems in ways that we can generalize. The beauty of a math like algebra is that it teaches us how to find solutions when we don’t have all the information, which is how we will have to face most problems in our lives. Specific challenges allow us to develop general skills.

You’d have to ask my students if this answer resonated with them, but I genuinely and sincerely believe it. I think most people who work in education would say something similar: the purpose of education is less about discovering specific information, or even about sharpening transferable skills. It’s about making us better, more informed, curious and empathetic human beings.

But is that what we as a culture and society really believe? 

Most of the time, the message being delivered for why you should graduate high school or go to college is because you’ll make more money over the course of your life than if you don’t. Sometimes that idea is wrapped in the language of “getting a better job,” which could also be a more meaningful and fulfilling one, but even that comes with the implication that fulfillment also means making more money.

Part of the allure of trade school, which I think falls under the umbrella of education for this discussion anyway, is that it bypasses the philosophical and gets straight to the material. You can contribute to society and all that, which is great, but really you learn a trade so you can get the certifications to get paid more.

It’s Like Using A Forklift At The Gym

And of course this is all true – you do, on average, make more money with more education. What’s wrong with that?

At face value, nothing! But that’s where the disconnect with AI comes in. If the sole purpose of education is to lead us to more money, which is what we’re hammering into students whether we like it or not, what’s the problem with using AI to do work we find tedious and unnecessary?

Most college grads don’t work in a field related to their degree. If we’re being honest, a college degree signals soft skills: the ability to be organized, meet deadlines, navigate bureaucracy, follow through on commitments without quitting, complete short-term tasks that add up to long-term projects. Frankly, you don’t need to read “War and Peace,” balance a chemical equation, or know how World War I started to develop any of those skills.

And perhaps the most real-world, job-ready skill you learn in school is that you can do something you don’t really care about or want to do simply because someone else told you to. That is the essential nature of most jobs, whether it’s retail or hospitality or corporate management.

Is this the future of education? Student work generated by AI receiving feedback from teachers generated by AI? An endless loop of ChatGPT talking to itself?

Of course for certain jobs this is not true. If you’re a doctor or an engineer, you’d better know what you’re doing by the time you enter the professional field. But for the HR reps, sales associates and bank managers of the world, you’ll probably learn what you need to know when you’re on the job.

To be clear, this is not a defense of kids using AI to do their work. I believe education is meant for more than enlarging your bank account. There is profound beauty and enrichment in learning about topics we hadn’t been exposed to before, and real danger in depriving ourselves of the ability to meet intellectual and academic challenges by conscripting AI to do our work.

If it were up to me, I’d get rid of public-consumption AI altogether. It strikes me as mostly a source of narrow, trivial pleasure in exchange for significant harm in a multitude of ways — many of which we are only now beginning to recognize.

We pathologize kids for responding sanely to the incentives we’ve given them, the stories we’ve told them about why they should stay in school and get an education. The problem is not with them; it’s with what we’ve told them.

To steal an analogy from writer Ben Fowlkes, using AI to do your homework is like using a forklift at the gym. The problem is, we’ve told kids what matters most is that the weight gets lifted, not that they develop the strength to move it on their own.

A friend suggested I use ChatGPT to give feedback to my students, at least the ones who used it to write their papers. I understand the logic: if a student puts in minimal time to produce their work, why not reciprocate their effort?

But is this the future of education? Student work generated by AI receiving feedback from teachers generated by AI? An endless loop of ChatGPT talking to itself?

What other incentives have we provided?

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.