Robot Teachers

AI in Industrial Education Machines.

About a week ago whilst wasting my life away on the Instagram Explore feature, I came across a post I’ve been thinking about since. It was a carousel of generic images of people in nature. They looked young, and they had hats on and were in fields looking up at the sky and stuff. A bit like this.

To find this image I searched ‘generic nature picture people looking at sky wearing a hat’

The caption was suggesting that in a decade or so, schools won’t exist, not because of technology but rather because schools will no longer fit in with our society. People, they suggested, will realise schools are industrial machines that promote and prepare students for a workplace that will no longer exist as it doesn’t benefit the people. I didn’t save this post because I thought it seemed quite cultish. And look, it probably was, but there are so many conversations about industries under threat now due to AI if anything I thought this perspective was almost refreshing and fascinating, even though I struggle to believe it.

As many of you will know, I am a high school teacher. In the past 13 years or so that I’ve been teaching I have seen many changes in the industry and not enough of them. Students have changed, parents have changed, and technology has changed. Covid changed everything and what people want to be when they grow up has changed too. One of the most oft-repeated phrases in teaching is that we are preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, and as a media teacher I am preparing them for jobs that may not exist.

Schools are built on a work model. In some respects, its nicer; the stakes seem much lower, the consequences don’t really exist till much later into your education, and if you don’t want to go, a guardian sorts it out for you. Though I have heard some people tell me that young people at their work get their parents to call in sick for them. I don’t want to suggest anything about the generations, but these are real stories from real people! The pressure students feel when studying is real, there is a lot of ‘because I say so’ and ‘that’s just the way it is’ in educational institutions which can often undermine their own importance. Another major element of this model is that it is the workplace of the staff. I know that sounds super obvious, but you have an industry that is burnt out and combatting with people who have been there forever and those who are being put in the classroom way too early because of the scarcity of teaching staff and the desperation of schools. It's also worth saying I am writing from a Western context in which most young people have access to education. Students around the world who aren’t at school aren’t liberated from the confines of capitalist education structures but rather devoid of the opportunity.[1] The role of teachers however, leads me to another interesting thing I saw on the internet this week, courtesy of The Social Juice.

The article, Teachers Using AI to Grade Their Students' Work Sends a Clear Message: They Don't Matter, and Will Soon Be Obsolete. Now I think we all understand the purpose of an attention-grabbing headline but grab me it did. As discussed in the article, many students are using AI as are many teachers. AI can help teachers write reports, mark student work, develop questions for tests and brainstorm assessment ideas as well as many other things I haven’t even thought of or thought to mention.

When I first started teaching and something written by a student read as too good to be true, I would copy and paste the section, or diligently type it out into Google and would often find the source of where they had pilfered it from. Now, I copy and paste it into one of the AI checkers suggested by the Department of Education and let it tell me the probability that something was written by AI. As it the way with student’s, even if it comes up as there-is-no-doubt-this-was-written-by-AI-your-student-thinks-you-are-a-chump, there are always students who will come up with some ridiculous reason as to why that’s the case.

Within the last year or so (and some may argue this is too late), my students have been studying AI and completing work which seeks to help them understand it. As always, we don’t judge media, we just want to use it in a way which benefits us and understand our relationship with it. And yes, my purpose for teaching media is the same one that informs this very newsletter.

One of the main counter arguments to AI making people obsolete is that AI can’t do the soft-skill stuff. But students tell me how they tell Snap Chat their problems and well we’ve all seen the memes about people saying thank you to ChatGPT so that they are in their good books for when these robots take over. AI and changing attitudes towards education, as well as people’s expectations of the purpose of education will continue to evolve and play a role in the relevance of schools. Anecdotally, it seems as if many students are choosing to avoid higher education and the lack of personalisation and being spoken at whilst being given no help are the most common reasons.

Students ‘cheating’ is nothing new and teacher’s using AI feels very similar to those teachers who photocopy the same worksheet year in and year out with very little consideration to the content or the context of their students. This is akin to teachers using AI and not engaging with their student work. These habits develop for lots of reasons, right? Laziness is simply one of them, teacher burnout, a lack of time and increasing pressures are some more. These reasons are also relevant to understanding a student’s use of AI too.

All these reasons impacting staff and students won’t be remedied with an increased use of AI. Just like capitalism won’t be fixed by pulling kids out of school and encouraging them to become YouTubers.

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I’d love to know, how is AI impacting your industry/how do you use it? And do we see a place for schools in the future?

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[1] I haven’t spoken about home schooling for many reasons, but I did used to teach at Distance Education which was a correspondence school. I shudder to think of AI in that setting.