The printing press, the calculator and the internet haven’t fundamentally changed how we educate our youngsters, and neither will AI, argues Martijn Heck.
Wax on, wax off. Everybody in their 40s will remember this sentence, spoken by Mr. Miyagi to his pupil Daniel, the Karate Kid. The repetitive motion of waxing a car is a training to build so-called muscle memory. I doubt it helps much with karate, even though I’m sure a lot of parents got their sons to clean the windows and floors with that promise. It’s a nice illustration, though, of the fact that mastery of a skill requires training. Often repetitive. And often unclear how it relates to the final goal. But essential, nevertheless.
I often hear “I don’t use anything from my studies in my job.” I honestly can’t believe that, unless either you haven’t been paying any attention in class, or your study was useless in the first place. Education shapes us.
Even when I was a dishwasher – a fate borne by many of my fellow graduates in the post-dot-com-crisis of the year 2002 – I was leveraging my geometrical and logical insights. The canteen lady was impressed that I could keep up with the dishes, but the only thing I did was efficiently load the dishwasher trays by laying out the Tetris of incoming cutlery, plates, glasses and cups. It’s just one example, and a result of ‘brain muscle memory,’ trained during many classes of geometry. People tend to overlook the value of such training. Maybe because it’s not so tangible?
These days, self-proclaimed education experts claim that AI will fundamentally and structurally change the education landscape. Will it? Sure, writing reports at home won’t remain a core evaluation method. But does it change what we need to learn? The foundations will stay the same. Students would still need to be able to solve equations by pen and paper in an exam. And know how to structure an argument, not just because ‘AI-proof’ oral examinations will be introduced, but also for conversation and discussion skills that are part of daily life.
When the calculator was introduced, some teachers were worried that math education would be negatively affected. Ignorami argued that students didn’t need to learn how to calculate anymore. However, the calculator is just a tool. We still need to be able to do mathematics and even do calculations by heart. When I read that ASML grows by 20,000 people, I need to know that that’s only 1 percent of the Brabant population, for example. I can get a calculator, but I won’t. I need ready knowledge to put things in context. To understand what I’m reading.
When the internet had taken off, education innovators argued that students didn’t need to learn facts. After all, you could just google facts. But when we talk about the Middle East situation, we need to know its history. Should we have the time to access Google before engaging in discussion, we still need to know enough to ask intelligent questions.
I don’t see why it will be different with AI. Again, ‘experts’ will argue that students don’t need to learn how to argue, how to calculate, how to organize and how to write and talk, because we have AI. But we do need to know that. We need to be able to see structure, we need to apply logic and we need awareness of context. In fact, we need to have exactly the same brain muscles as ten years ago, a hundred years ago and even a thousand years ago. Nothing has changed.
That’s what education should bring us. Establishing those strong foundations with children and students. These are just as valuable and necessary in the age of AI as in the age of the printing press, the calculator and the internet.
Dutch teens have been showing a distinct decline in math and reading skills over the last two decades, according to the Pisa scores. That should trigger alarm bells, not AI. Let’s focus first on the basis. Without a strong foundation, every building will collapse. And Daniel-san would have toppled over when he did The Crane.
