As AI gets smarter, our children get dumber
by Kathleen O'Toole · The Washington TimesOPINION:
“Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.”
Those were the damning words of neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee earlier this year.
If we don’t radically change our approach to education and development, then the next generation will never unlock its full intellectual potential.
As our children grow weaker, our tools grow smarter. Every week, artificial intelligence models break new boundaries, solving complex problems and advancing with an efficiency thought impossible just a few years ago.
The world stands in awe of machine intelligence, even as human intelligence is slipping away.
These trends are historical anomalies. Over the 20th century, cognitive performance increased as education spread and improved.
Then, a few years into the 21st century, something changed. Literacy, math skills, problem-solving, creativity and science performance all declined. Reading scores dropped for every single percentile of fourth-grade test takers.
At the college level, only 5% of students could understand a passage from Charles Dickens well enough to describe it in plain English.
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Elite universities are having to put freshmen in remedial math. Half of adults read below a sixth-grade level.
What happened?
COVID-19 is often blamed, but educational attainment was declining before pandemic-driven learning loss. Reduced academic standards share some responsibility, but low expectations aren’t enough to cause these drops.
The real culprit is technology. As Mr. Horvath put it, “Increased classroom screen exposure is generally associated with weaker learning outcomes, not stronger ones. … In most core academic contexts, screens slow learning, reduce depth of understanding and weaken retention.”
No matter how talented the teacher, how motivated the student or how well-funded the school, the more time students spend on screens, the worse they perform.
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The data is not ambiguous. Yet students, parents and educators are, once again, blindly walking into an even more dangerous trap of technology with the integration of AI into classrooms.
First lady Melania Trump was recently escorted into a White House event on AI and education, accompanied by a walking, talking robot. “Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato,’” she said next to the machine. “Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history — humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home.”
The promise is seductive but dangerous.
For more than 15 years, we have conducted a society wide experiment integrating technology into education. That experiment has failed disastrously. Yet now many say, “But it might work with AI.”
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At some point, we must stop digging the hole deeper. We should reject the new and unproven in favor of a classical approach, especially because we know it works. Just look at our ancestors. Even before universal education and pocket encyclopedias in the form of smartphones, ordinary people, using good books and the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic, achieved intellectual feats we couldn’t imagine today.
Without losing focus, tens of thousands of people watched the Lincoln-Douglas debates — three-hour-long marathons of dense syntax, high rhetoric and sustained argumentation. Today, students at our top universities are assigned excerpts because many can’t handle complete books.
Thousands used to overflow auditoriums simply to hear Robert Frost recite poetry. Today, people can’t even watch a TV show without scrolling through their phones at the same time.
Our forefathers built pyramids and rockets, predicted eclipses, navigated the oceans, calculated the size of the Earth and derived the laws of physics, all without the aid of computers.
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Imagine what else the human mind could be capable of if we pushed it to its limits.
That’s the greatest sin of tech-infused education: not that scores are declining but that we are being robbed of our collective ability to achieve by outsourcing thought to machines.
Technology promises to do everything for us, but that’s precisely what we shouldn’t want in the life of the mind. Tools that think on our behalf, correct our mistakes, replace our memory and gamify our activities deprive us of the struggle we need to grow.
In the science fiction classic “Dune,” humans launch a crusade against thinking machines that undermine human autonomy and hollow out human agency. Their triumph leads to unprecedented advances in mental capabilities.
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This lesson shouldn’t be taken literally. Computers, screens and other machines can bring great good, and tearing them down won’t automatically elevate human intelligence. Still, the tale offers a nugget of truth: When machines begin to think for us, we aren’t gaining an advantage. We are only losing our minds.
• Kathleen O’Toole is the associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College and a high school teacher at Hillsdale Academy.