When something gets its own unique acronym, we can consider it to have arrived.

Sometime during the last few years, Artificial Intelligence achieved this special status. The promise of AI includes significant economic and societal benefits, such as enhancing productivity and innovation across various sectors. AI can improve business performance through applications like predictive maintenance, logistics optimization, and renewable energy management.

How do I know this? Because AI says so. In fact, the whole last sentence of the previous paragraph comes verbatim from the AI embedded in my internet browser.

But is this language a little too rosy? Does AI have any downsides?

There are in fact some issues with AI, including ensuring the ethical use of AI, addressing privacy concerns, and mitigating the risk of job displacement. Additionally, there is a need to develop explainable AI to provide transparency on AI-driven decision-making processes.

That comes from AI too.

“If a Cretan says that all Cretans are liars, can you believe him?” Eubulides of Miletus once asked, pointing out that as soon as someone admits his flaws, even his admission becomes suspect. “‘Artificial intelligence’ is not always right,” says AI, a statement you can only be fully certain about if AI is always right.

Leave it to a 4th century Greek philosopher to confuse the issue. He probably didn’t even have a computer!

So I decided to test AI on something I’ve spent my life studying. I asked it, “What is education for?” a question most educators don’t even ask themselves. The answer it spit back was rather disjointed, but the upshot was the two purposes of education are to learn job skills and to learn better how to change society.

AI is accurate in one sense: this is probably what most educators themselves think education is for. Its answer is inspired by the two great movements in American education during the 20th century: Vocationalism, under the influence of William Heard Kilpatrick, and progressivism, for which we can thank John Dewey.

What many people today don’t realize, however, is that this was not the traditional purpose of education. Before Dewey, most people thought that the purpose of education was to pass on the ideals and values of our civilization. It was also seen as responsible for shaping each student into a human being in accordance with these beliefs.

That’s why we taught history and literature. The old stories (and even the then-new ones) embodied what we believed about the true, the good and the beautiful. And they inspired each student to imitate the actions of the good people they encountered in them.

It is not accident that these subjects are endangered educational species in many of today’s schools.

The old education (what today we would call “classical education”) didn’t even try to teach job skills. That would have been considered preposterous. Schools were not equipped to do this kind of thing well, and they knew that if they tried to do it, they would not be able to do the things they were designed to do.

This situation is only more pronounced by the tech revolution. Anyone who thinks that our K-12 schools are equipped to train students in the modern tech economy needs to confront the fact that our schools are about the least likely place to find technical expertise. In fact, many students know more about technology than their teachers.

And progressivist social and political activism? We’ve all seen the videos of teachers, apparently interested more in gender and race issues than in the skills and knowledge students need to act rightly and to think well in our society. One wonders where they find time to pursue these agendas when reading and math skills are in such decline.

As David Epstein points out in his excellent book “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,” the people who will thrive in the modern economy are not people who have specialized vocational training, but a broad educational background outside the specialties they might one day pursue.

This is what the old classical education tried to do: to teach students how to think and act through the liberal arts and the humanities.

Strangely, even though AI doesn’t include these things in the purpose of education, if you ask it a question about them, it agrees with this idea. It apparently can’t make up its mind. But that shouldn’t prevent us from making up our own.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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