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📢 Teaching My Son to "Cheat" with AI: A Parenting Confession in the Age of ChatGPT
We need to rethink learning and education in our new AI world.
I have a confession.
It was the night before my 11-year-old had a big assignment due—you know the one: a multi-page slide deck on the geography, economy, flag, history, language, religion, major exports, currency, flora and fauna, food, and customs for a country of your choosing. He chose Romania. At 6 p.m., he had the flag and a map, some pictures of meat stews, and an interesting but tangential story about Dracula.
There was no way he was going to get through the checklist before bedtime, so I did what all middle-class helicopter parents around the world do: I helped him finish it. We sat down at the kitchen table, and I told him to start by looking up Britannica and Wikipedia for some basic information, write out notes in his own words (not copy and paste), do some more research, take more notes, and start building a report. Then I looked at the long list of tasks on the assignment sheet and thought…. um... NO THANKS.
So I taught him how to prompt ChatGPT for a summary of each topic with linked sources, and then to double-check the sources with Google to see if they are reputable and correct. Lastly, I told him to add a dash of personal color and throw in some grammatical and spelling mistakes to cover up his venal cheating ways.
Poor kid. He was terribly worried and confused about his mother’s sudden zeal for rule-breaking. But I honestly thought, why not? The assignment wasn’t teaching him how to think. It was teaching him how to assemble dry factual information and lay it out nicely on a page.
So I told him, this is not a skill for humans anymore. It’s a task for AI.
By the time my kids finish school, artificial intelligence will have fundamentally reshaped the world they'll enter as adults, and I worry about that a lot.
Is the education system preparing them for the future? Will they have meaningful careers? Is the traditional path through university, with its accompanying mountain of debt, still the right choice? Will the notion of a 'career' seem like a quaint anachronism in 30 years? What does it mean for society when once-predictable career pathways close down and 'meaningful' work becomes a luxury? And, what exactly should I be nagging (I mean supportively encouraging) my kids to do more of?
So, I wanted to (start to) explore these questions in our latest episode of Your Undivided Attention. The guests are Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist who wrote one of my favorite books about learning, "Proust and the Squid," and Rebecca Winthrop, Brookings' global education expert and co-author of the fabulous The Disengaged Teen.
It was a great discussion; I loved the parts about critical thinking, cognitive offloading, and Rebecca Withrop's research into the different learning modes. Clearly, 'achiever' mode, with its focus on grades and conformism, which our education systems reward, will not be a winning educational goal in the future.
I'd love you to listen to this episode (or read the four-minute takeaways) and share your thoughts about the interview - and/or my derelict parenting. I think there are threads of this conversation that should be happening in families, schools, universities, and governments all around the world.
We’ve just scratched the surface.
Cheers,
Rethinking School in the Age of AI
AI has upended schooling as we know it. Students now have instant access to tools that can write their essays, summarize entire books, and solve complex math problems. Whether they want to or not, many feel pressured to use these tools just to keep up. Teachers, meanwhile, are left questioning how to evaluate student performance …
Teaching in the Age of AI: How to Grow Thinkers, Not Just Test Takers
On a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, experts Maryanne Wolf and Rebecca Winthrop explored what Artificial Intelligence means for the classroom and learning. How can we ensure children develop the skills they need to navigate an uncertain future?
I am of the opinion that we need to be more careful with what technology we engage with and push forward. For so many reasons AI is one that I do not support. Rather than continuing to adopt this position of immediately assimilating in order to fit in and make sure we don’t fall behind, maybe we should stick to our values and morals. Why are we so eager to adopt technology that makes things more productive rather than technology that makes us happier, more at peace, more emotionally intelligent? Maybe we should focus more on how to evolve emotionally rather than technologically or how can we be more productive. And make our children more productive. This is just so the wrong direction for humanity.
Noting that a lot of the responses are focused in on the AI usage itself, but I wanted to comment on the parenting and schooling aspects.
As a parent, I share your concerns about what "meaningful, life-giving work" means in the future when so few of us can even find it now. I also am slowly embracing unschooling/deschooling as my kid nears school age, which means questioning and resisting the assumptions put in place by schools, among them the necessity of mandated assignments and curriculum. Much has been written and studied about how standardized schooling suppresses and destroys a person's desire to learn and they instead become good at "performing studenthood" for the authorities. How much of that actually builds skills, resilience and creativity for navigating the challenges of today's world?
I'm personally opposed to the wanton use of GenAI, because it's both energy-intensive and yields unimaginative results that make a mockery of human ingenuity, BUT there is something to this notion of teaching our kids to navigate the world in ways that are "smart" and maybe a little cheeky/disruptive, rather than simply abiding by the expectations put on us by institutions who were designed to create obedient, predictable workers to keep the capitalist machine going.
It can be tough to put yourself out there as a parent, and I feel like sometimes parents are the most-criticized people in the world even though no one gave us a training manual and it's one of the hardest jobs in existence, so I applaud you for starting this conversation! I believe it is a good one.