AI IN EDUCATION
The education system’s response to AI has been mostly panic, mostly focused on the wrong question.
The question dominating staff rooms and policy documents is: how do we stop students from using AI to cheat? It’s a reasonable concern with no good answer, because the detection tools don’t work, the arms race between generators and detectors produces false positives, and the attempt to ban AI from education prepares students for a world that no longer exists.
The more interesting question — the one that could actually improve education — is: how do we use AI to give every student access to something that has historically only been available to the privileged few?
The Tutoring Problem
The single biggest predictor of educational outcome, after socioeconomic background, is access to individualised instruction. A student with a private tutor who gives personalised feedback, adapts to their pace, notices when they’ve misunderstood a concept, and adjusts accordingly — that student has a massive advantage over a student in a class of thirty with one teacher.
AI tutoring systems can, for the first time in history, give every student something approaching that experience. Not a replacement for a great teacher — but a patient, knowledgeable presence that’s available at 11pm when the student is stuck on a problem and there’s nobody else to ask.
“AI tutoring can give every student something approaching individualised instruction — the biggest predictor of educational outcome after family income.”
What Needs to Change
The education system needs to redesign assessment, not just enforcement. If a written essay can be produced by AI, then assessing essays as a proxy for understanding is broken — not because AI cheating, but because the assessment was always a proxy, and the proxy is now unreliable. Oral examination, project work, demonstrated application in context: these are harder to fake and better at measuring what we actually care about.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence • Opinion • Technology & Society • 192.168.1.22/