Time to be contentious! Did AI break our ability to learn?

Aaron H recently posted on his LinkedIn a small op-ed that grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. So hard in fact that I pretty much had to echo his thoughts here

Right, so apparently I'm meant to be terrified that AI is destroying our students' thinking abilities and rotting their brains. Clutches pearls dramatically. (Thanks, Aaron, for that metaphor 😉 )

Here's the thing, though, and bear with me whilst I commit the cardinal sin of suggesting we might have got this backwards. Perhaps the real villain in this story wasn't ChatGPT.

Perhaps it was us all along. {insert dramatic Duhn Duhn Duhhnnn!!! }

The inconvenient truth about thinking skills

For over a decade, John Hattie's research has been waving a rather large flag about the importance of higher-order thinking. Did we listen? Well, sort of. We nodded sagely, added it to our strategic plans, and then carried on teaching to the test because, well, high-stakes exams like the HSC don't measure metacognition well, do they?

We've spent decades perfecting an education system that rewards compliance over curiosity, memorisation over meaning-making, and sitting still over asking awkward questions. We've turned learning into a performance where the script is predetermined and improvisation is marked down.

And now we're shocked - shocked! - that when students encounter a tool that can regurgitate information, they don't instinctively reach for critical analysis?

The false dichotomy driving me spare

What's particularly frustrating is watching the current pendulum swing back to direct instruction with all the nuance of a sledgehammer. Don't get me wrong - explicit teaching has its place. But why must we always frame this as an either/or debate?

Why can't we have robust direct instruction and opportunities for higher-order thinking?

Why can't we teach foundational knowledge and develop critical reasoning? It's not like our brains come with a toggle switch marked "facts" or "thinking."

When AI flips the script (literally)

Here's where it gets properly interesting. AI is essentially turning Bloom's taxonomy upside down.

Instead of starting with remembering facts and slowly climbing towards creation, students now begin with the creative challenge of crafting the right question. They must evaluate and critique the AI's response, analyse its relevance, apply it to their specific context, understand its broader implications, and only then commit the useful bits to memory.

It's almost as if AI has forced us into higher-order thinking, whether we like it or not. The irony is delicious - the very tool we're worried will stop students thinking is actually demanding they think more strategically about how they think.

A rather uncomfortable question

So here's my invitation to reflection (and feel free to ignore it if you're having a perfectly lovely day): If we're genuinely worried that AI is preventing our students from thinking, shouldn't we first ask why they weren't particularly keen on thinking before AI came along?

Maybe the problem isn't that we've given students a thinking tool. Maybe the problem is that we never really taught them to think in the first place.

Thoughts? Disagreements? Gentle corrections to my obviously flawed reasoning? The comments await.

#AI #Education #CriticalThinking #EdTech #ChatGPT #FutureOfLearning #Pedagogy #AIinEducation #CurriculumDesign #JohnHattie #HigherOrderThinking #DirectInstruction #TeachingWithAI