“Revising our assignments, however, is not sufficient for adapting to The AI Age,” Jason Gulya writes in his opinion piece “Will Agentic AI Break Higher Education?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Focusing on how to retool the assignments is not, in fact, assigning work that AI can’t do. The problem is not AI. Soon agentic AI will not only log in and satisfy the assignments in Canvas, it will also create the assignments, lectures, and tests that the students will offload. And it will do it because it can. Agentic AI will be able to craft the coursework and then satisfy it because the system of education has become so commodified that it is now more system than education.
If we want to create work that AI can’t do—as professors and as students—we need to return to the model of education that rejects tools in favor of substance; that is, we must prioritize inquiry over test scores. Inquiry-based education is education, to many of the philosophers and critical theorists who have investigated what it means to educate, including Dewey, Marcuse, Freire, and hooks. We ignore the critical writing of the last century at our peril, as educators, as students, and as a nation.
The educational process is exactly that: a process. Over the last 40 years, we have divested and defunded education until it is now merely a matter of ticks in boxes: attendance, test scores, and property valuations are not the scaffold on which to build an inquiring mind. We have so prioritized “accurate” answers that we have harrowed out the question altogether.
Critical thinking skills in the United States remain abysmal; literacy is on the decline; maths classes continue to report that students are far behind their peers in other countries. And yet the response, in all levels of education, seems to be to have more tools and less funding. Larger class sizes, lead by remote professors, built on syllabi that are increasingly rubric based are incapable of achieving the results we say we want: sharp, quick minds able to problem solve in holistic and creative ways, investigating beyond the borders of one syllabus or one subject.
Gulya sees the problem in education to be one of transactionality, but truly the problem runs much deeper than that. We have turned all the elements of education into levers and switches to be thrown for reflective conformity, a performance of one-dimensional regurgitation by both student and educator. To ask questions of the question, to investigate “wrong” answers is now seen as a waste of time, a waste of resources, and a failed education. Investigation is engagement. We cannot stifle one without stifling the other.
The brightest minds on the planet are not being taught in classrooms with the best technology and tools; they are found in small groups under a tree in some of the poorest countries. The dialectic inquiry that this classroom affords cannot be replicated by AI in any way.
Do more of that, and we will have education.
What it will cost us is the assessment-based commodification and indifference we, as policy makers, have consistently imposed upon the very idea of schools.
