#ai-in-education

#ai-in-education

The issue is not that the column takes AI seriously; higher education should take AI seriously. The issue is that it mistakes machine-generated prescription for human judgment and acceleration for destiny.

Content is abundant. Genuine understanding-the kind that survives three weeks and transfers to a new problem-is far rarer. Completion rates for online courses hover below 15%, according to MIT and Harvard researchers studying MOOCs. Students enroll with real intent, then drift away. The content was never the problem. The design was.

A Pew Research Center survey of 1,458 U.S. teens and their parents from Sept. 25 to Oct. 9, 2025-finds that 57% of teens use AI to search for information, while 54% use it to help with schoolwork. Yet their queries extend beyond asking a chatbot to define the Pythagorean Theorem or to explain the significance of Boo Radley's character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Parents are opting their children out of school-issued laptops and are asking teachers to return to pen and paper. In a recent report, families described a growing discomfort with this digital imperative in education. Importantly, this is less about the logistical aspects of technology and more about something universal: Control. These instincts seem reasonable. Screens distract, and artificial intelligence hovers over homework like an invisible, or worse, a co-conspirator in cheating.

Whenever I made my initial rounds at a school, a quick peek at its technological resources was often a reliable predictor of its ability to meet students' broad needs. The differences in the quality and volume of computing labs at a school like Lincoln Park High School on Chicago's wealthy north side, where the local population is 75% white, versus Raby High School, located in economically distressed East Garfield Park which is 83% Black, were stark.

Designed for a comparative literature course on medieval and Renaissance-era writing and announced by UCLA at the end of 2024, the digital textbook was immediately met with widespread mockery and derision from educators. Its AI-generated cover was riddled with incomprehensible text - "Of Nerniacular Latin To An Evoolitun On Nance Langusages," for example - and featured generic visuals that had little to do with the period it was supposedly covering. At the time, Elizabeth Landers, a grad student who helped put together the volume, said that the errors "aren't a failure of AI." Instead, she argued, "they're an intentional artistic choice that prompts students to question their assumptions about language, meaning and historical truth."

Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in. "If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting," Bond says, "and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil."