Cambron Wright of Kentucky, who has three kids under 7 and a fourth child due soon, put it bluntly: “Adding A.I. to ed tech would be an unmitigated disaster on a social, spiritual and educational level.” His oldest child attends public school, and Wright describes himself as a conservative Christian. He added, “Even beyond politics, who among all political stripes wants their children to be taught by robots? Does it get any more dystopian?”
Karen Friedman, the mother of two teenagers in New Jersey public schools, said that she has seen the effects of a technology-soaked learning process for her children, and she’s not impressed. Her older child is a junior in high school, and “her grade was the first in our district to have one-to-one technology from kindergarten — meaning before she could write, my daughter was placed in front of a computer and was learning Google Suite,” Friedman said.
In general, outside the classroom, Friedman thinks A.I. slop, or shoddy content, is exacerbating a natural teen “tendency toward cynicism and social mistrust.” And in the classroom? “A.I. encourages surface perfectionism without developing the tools and stamina necessary for true critical thinking,” she said.
While the A.I. executive order states as an objective preparing kids for an A.I.-dominated job market, I don’t know how that could be the case. Nobody knows how A.I. is going to affect jobs going forward, and corporations are still figuring out exactly how they’re integrating the technology into their workflow. Despite rampant use of A.I. among college students today, there is some fear that the technology is actually dampening the job market — and it’s hard to come up with fresh solutions or innovative new businesses if you’re outsourcing so much of your thinking. If A.I. is going to destroy jobs anyway, students might as well actually learn to use their brains for the fun of it.
I feel like a broken record saying this, but I still cannot believe that after living through the school closures of 2020-21, our policymakers continue to underestimate the importance of human connection, especially in primary school. Parents definitely understand how important social development is, and according to a Gallup poll from March, many parents feel their children are still struggling: “45 percent of parents of school-age children say the pandemic has had a negative impact on their child’s social skills development. Half of them, 22 percent, report the social difficulty is ongoing.”
