AI as a new vantage for revealing the function of schooling: Returning to the question of what education is for

• In Event: Artificial intelligence and educational policy: impact and influence

Proposal

Envisioning education in a digital society compels educators to go beyond adapting ‘educational answers’ to new digital contexts. Indeed, artificial intelligence (AI) tools (as Chat GPT) are producing a rupture, that afford a return to the ‘question’ of what education is for. This conceptual paper presentation digs into the heart of the program theme by drawing on the historicizing approaches of Hannah Arendt (2006) and David Scott (2004) to accentuate the taken-for-granted filtering function of schooling and to re-envision educational purpose. Arendt (p. 171) reminds us, in times of crisis or dramatic transformation we must not forget that “the answers” we normally rely on, were originally answers to questions. In a similar fashion, Scott (p. 4) urges theorists to differentiate between past and present historical conditions, to historicize the ‘question’ or ‘longing for change’ over fixating on the answers that were produced in conditions that have changed. My paper presentation considers the AI revolution not only as threat or risk, but as a new vantage to rethink educational aims and processes in a digital society. Rethinking educational aims presses educators to consider how educational ‘means’ (vehicles) as assessment and particular pedagogical approaches have effectively become the ‘ends,’ producing, for example, the anxieties around cheating and policing. In the global South countries are pressed to play ‘catch up,’ but focused on these educational means (transported from the North). Without a substantive re-envisioning of education/schooling attuned to the ‘historical present,’ good intentions for educational policy reform, will be short-circuited.

Debates are growing across several fronts on the uses and abuses of AI and the shorter- and longer-term implications for education. A major concern is on the question of ‘cheating’ and, more conceptually, on the entitlements that school achievement is to afford. How can we adjudicate on students’ relative progress and achievement in a fair way if some students can cheat (or, more profoundly, if non-humans can outperform humans)? How will we, as a collective, determine economic and citizenship entitlements if not founded on school measurements of achievement/merit?

So entrenched is the notion that schools are to set up the conditions for ‘learning/achievement races’ to compete in the schooling-work trajectory, that we miss the very essence of education (author). Further, given the growing import of equity, diversity and inclusion, efforts become focussed on how to run these ‘learning’ races fairly, based on merit and hard work, rather than social status/advantage. Schooling is to include diversities in reducing discrimination, such that historically disadvantaged groups will have a fair chance to compete in the learning races. AI deeply threatens the notion of schooling where functioning as a meritocratic filter.

Some are wondering if AI might be able to catch AI, to uphold the integrity of the learning races. Mark Daley (2024) calls this false hope the “AI detection illusion.” Daley pushes for a more forward-looking orientation, stating:
Instead of chasing technological silver bullets, educators need to confront the harder questions: Why are students cheating? How can we create assessments that value critical thinking over regurgitation? How do we foster a culture of learning rather than one of grade-chasing? (np)
I agree with Daley’s recommendation to turn attention away from ‘catching cheaters’ to reconsidering pedagogical aims and practices. And we must go further than (better) assessments of higher order thinking and of processes of learning. We need to redirect practices of schooling from filtering students to educating them to understand and renew a common world facing multiple crises; here, I’m thinking of the need to engage in existential questions of belonging, meaning making, shared histories of cooperation and conflict, human “survivance,” and the possibilities for collective human agency in the world (author).

Of course, we progressive educationalists and stakeholders want to foster critical thinking and cultures of learning (over grade chasing) in schools. But more fundamentally, I am arguing that schools become educational spaces where the concept of cheating, or unfairly beating someone else, becomes senseless—incommensurate with how educators and students use their time together to examine ‘what the world is like’ (Arendt, 2006), and how they are situated within it (Rizvi, 2009).

In recent years, I have entered several academic and anecdotal conversations with policy actors as the International Baccalaureate (IB), OECD and UNESCO that help elucidate my argument here (author). There is much agreement on the heading that Daley recommends above. Each of these (quasi) progressive visions for education, however, remain circumscribed within these filtering/competitive/social-class-making uses of education. Indeed, the IB’s very growth, sustainability and distinction lie in the ‘positional advantage’ (Doherty, 2012; author) it affords its users. The OECD, perhaps the least progressive of these three policy actors, is very much dug into the goal of improving measurements, to more effectively orient schooling for developing human and social capital globally (author). And even UNESCO, given its macro-orientation and notion of lifting educational systems in the global South, (necessarily) is caught in measurement and international comparisons. Might schooling be re-imagined to educate rather than assess students?

The stakes are high beyond education, because AI portends even greater disruptions to political economy, work and the organization of human societies. AI and automation might mean that human labour becomes an ever-lower percentage of overall labour and (calculable) economic productivity. Under this heading, our access to resources for survival and security and our rights to practise political citizenship and participate in world making can no longer be based on our economic productivity. Schooling can be reactive in working to orchestrate more meaningful and fair learning/ achievement races in the competitive global educational marketplace. My sense is that progressively fewer and fewer children and youth will buy into the notion, or bear the fruits, of this kind of ‘education’ under both the AI revolution and the intensification of human and planetary precarity. Alternatively, schooling might be re-oriented by returning to the question of what it means to be educated in an AI-trending world. I think that we have yet to engage in this more essential task.

Author

• Paul Tarc, Western University, Faculty of Education