Teaching Students About AI or Any Technology Just Might Be Shortsighted and Morally Wrong

Should our schools be focused on training students how to use AI above all else? No. Here’s why…

In the 1990s, I taught at a high school located in an area where 3 major fiber option manufacturers had set up shop, and they partnered with our schools to prepare students for the kinds of jobs they had to offer.

I attended multiple PD sessions, guided by district personnel and trainers from these three manufacturers. The goal was to train teachers to teach students the kinds of skills these manufacturers, and others like them, valued in employees.

I went back to my classroom and dutifully and conscientiously taught those skills because it was my job to teach students for the jobs in their future.

Fast forward 7 or 8 years later…the fiber optic industry tanked when demand fell. These manufacturers closed plants, merged and merged again, and laid off workers and shifted jobs to foreigh countries. Many lost their jobs, perhaps even some that I had dutifully prepared for that future.

The point here is business and manufacturing often live and survive in the short term and the now. They no longer provide lifetime careers. If profits can be made by shifting manufacturing elsewhere, they move. That’s how it is.

As educators, to prepare students for any jobs that exist currently or even hypothetically in the future is also shortsighted and potentially morally wrong. The current job situation will change when companies find the grass greener elsewhere, and trying to teach skills for jobs whose existence we are trying to predict or guess about is gambling our students’ futures. That is wrong.

The Seers of Silicon Valley have gotten much wrong in the past. I bet their predictions about AI will be wrong as well, or at least far off the mark.

As educators, we need to teach students, not for theoretical futures. We need to teach them everything that will allow them to live, adapt, cope, and survive in uncertainty and be decent, critical human beings.

Obsessively focusing on AI or any technology of the day is as shortsighted as most businesses currently operate. Sure, knowing what AI is, its faults, its capabilities, its limitations, its effects on culture and the environment, are all needed, but not placed at the center of all learning.

The point is, we do not need to do Silicon Valley bidding and teach students to be dutiful users of AI or any technology; we need to teach way beyond that to a world where AI has passed into banality and life has moved on to even greater things.