The Future of Education is Not Personalized
It's Personal
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As much as I enjoy lecturing in front of a class, those aren't my favorite moments as a professor. The moments that bring me the most joy are not when I'm face to face with students but when I'm shoulder to shoulder with them. The future I want for our educational spaces is not one of personalized mechanical tutors powered by generative AI, but rather one where we double down on the personal and relational aspects of what it means to learn and grow.
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I'm fortunate to have many opportunities to do this in the classes I teach. Our engineering curriculum at Harvey Mudd is permeated with active learning, seeking to close the gap between seeing and doing as frequently as possible.
The course I co-taught this semester with a group of six other colleagues is a good example. Students go through a set of seven labs where they are constantly connecting theory with practice. They build instruments to measure temperature, run experiments to verify simulations of aerodynamic drag in a wind tunnel, and program algorithms to help their robots navigate underwater to controlled depths.
As I ponder the future of education in the age of AI, I've been thinking more about the experience my students have in my classes. In particular, I'm curious to explore where the real learning happens. It seems that the promise of AI is the elimination of friction.
Not all friction is bad
As I see my students work toward these tasks, they inevitably encounter many bumps along the way. The circuit they designed and simulated doesn't work once they wire it up. The data they collected doesn't match the behavior predicted by their model. These bumps in their experience create friction, a consequence of the difference between what they think they know and what they can effectively reduce to practice. These are the moments when learning happens.
There seems to be a movement that considers friction in education to be undesirable. But what if the friction is the thing we care about? Of course, there are many examples of wasteful friction that we should eliminate: busy work assignments, poorly designed lectures, and clunky course organization and communication are all things that come to mind. But there are other sources of friction that we should lean into; places where the process is messy and filled with twists and turns, but the energy dissipated as friction is forming and shaping us into new people.
What I'm doing as I work alongside my students as they encounter friction is not primarily trying to give them more knowledge. Sure, I'm trying to address and close knowledge gaps, but my role in those situations is more like a coach, empathizing with their struggle and encouraging them to keep going. Perhaps the transmission of information can be addressed by AI-powered chatbots, but what about the other functions of teachers like coaching?
In academic spaces, we often think that lack of knowledge is the main problem to be solved. Through this lens, the goal of education is to help students know what to do and how to do it. The what and the how are certainly important. Technical excellence is critical for solving the gnarly problems that our world faces. But while focusing on the what and the how we often lose sight of the who. In this mode, whatever character growth we see in students is a side effect of the other things that we are doing. As we help them to solve technical problems, perhaps they pick up a little courage, humility, and patience. But it’s not the main objective.
What if, instead of making technical excellence our most desirable aim we thought more holistically about our students? What if we were to focus at least as much on who they are becoming than on what they will be able to do? And if we truly embraced this holistic perspective, how would it change the way we do our work?
We need character more than ever
You all know I've been thinking a lot about generative AI over the past few years, with particular attention toward its potential opportunities and threats in educational spaces. I've begun to think more deeply about my hopes for education as generative AI goes from the wow-factor novelty of our first contact ChatGPT to the new normal where generative AI seeps into all the nooks and crannies of learning spaces both in and out of the classroom.
The design and impact of generative AI is shaped by those who are building it. In many areas, generative AI is closing the gap between the hypothetical and the real. The trolley problem is now the Waymo problem. Questions about what it means to be human and the value of human life are boiling up as we wonder what might be needed for LLMs to be sentient or conscious. Ethical questions which once were squarely in the domain of armchair philosophers are now live questions that are being answered by the programmers who are implementing answers to them in the algorithms they are designing.
As I think about the future of education, I'm trying to see it from the perspective of my students. To consider the learning experiences they're having in my classes and to focus on the sources of effective friction that we need to embrace, even as generative AI offers us many ways to eliminate friction in other areas.
I hope you'll indulge me as I think out loud about a few moves that I think will be critical for colleges and universities in the age of generative AI. The idea that ties them all together is that education is about persons. In this vein, here are three themes for the future of education.
Personal, not personalized
Virtue and character first, skills second
Active creators, not passive consumers
Embrace personal, not personalized education
As generative AI continues to improve, we're going to encounter more and more ways to outsource our work to a machine. Sometimes, this will be a no-brainer. I don't think I'm losing much by having ChatGPT help me more efficiently write spreadsheet functions. In this example, what matters is the product and the results of the computations in the spreadsheet.
But there are other places where it's going to be a big issue. To take an example from a different, non-AI domain, consider the hand-written letter. It communicates to a customer or to a friend that you care. It takes time to write something by hand, to find a stamp, and to drop it in the mail. Or at least it used to.
Enter Roboquill. Roboquill understands the value of a handwritten letter but knows that it simply takes too much time. So, to solve this issue, they've built a robot that will take the hand out of handwritten. While your letter is being written forged, you can kick back and sip a coffee.
This example illustrates the temptation that we'll soon be regularly facing: what if we can automate our work without anyone knowing the difference?
The first casualty: Recommendation letters
One area in academic circles that has been a subject of much conversation already is recommendation letters. Recommendation letters are an example of a product that is a signal about something else. Writing a killer recommendation letter for a student is not really about the letter itself. It's about the indication that a professor would be willing to invest the time needed to write and craft the letter. Recommendation letters are like a burnt offering. What's in the letter matters, but the existence of a high-quality letter from a person whose time is very valuable is the most significant part. The same impulse is at the root of many different applications of generative AI in education with automated grading and generation of course materials being two specific examples.
I'm not arguing that there is no role for generative AI in these spaces, but we had better be careful. In outsourcing our work to the machine, we're suggesting that the sum total of the thing can be mechanized. In many situations, this is misattributing value to the product rather than the process. While the process is often much harder to assess, it's often the place where the real value is found.
Focus on virtue and character first. Skills second.
We spend a lot of time in our courses focused on content and skill acquisition. This develops a certain type of expertise, but may or may not develop the wisdom to steward it well.
In a technical field like engineering a strong moral compass and deep ethical thoughtfulness is even more important. If the medium is the message, then the medium makers hold a great deal of power. What sort of people do we hope our builders become?
We should care deeply about helping students cultivate not only technical skills but virtues as well. As we give our students the power to shape the world, we should simultaneously help them see the way that power will shape them and develop virtues like patience, persistence, courage, and a love for each other in the process. We often view these as great side effects but don't spend much time trying to build them.
Education is about persons
If we want to make a difference, here is a clear way. Make all, within your society, members of the crew and permit no passengers. - Elton Trueblood in Alternative to Futility
There is one core dogma that centers all my beliefs about education: education is about persons. As we enter a world where we increasingly see personal relationships replaced by personalized technology, we ought to be on alert. The choices we make will speak volumes about what we truly believe about ourselves and our students.
Recommended Reading
I’ve recommended it many times before but will do so again here. Andy Crouch’s latest book, The Life We Are Looking For, was what really got me thinking about the personal/personalized distinction. Although the book does not specifically address generative AI, it’s nonetheless an important read for anyone thinking about technology’s impact on us, including that of generative AI.
I would also recommend an essay from Belmont University President Greg Jones on “Formation for Flourishing in Higher Education” in Virtues and Vocations.
A good piece from
reflecting on a recent piece in Nature and asking whether AI really beats humans at basic tasks.
This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from University of Florida President
on their approach on free speech and protest.Teachers ought to be ushering students into the world of argument and persuasion. Minds are changed by reason, not force. Progress depends on those who do the soulful, patient work of inspiring intellects. Martin Luther King Jr., America’s greatest philosopher, countered the nation’s original sin of racism by sharpening the best arguments across millennia. To win hearts, he offered hope that love could overcome injustice.
The Book Nook
Not enough hours in the day, but I’m still chugging along trying to catch up on our current murder mystery book club book, In The Woods by Tana French. Wish me luck as I try to polish off 300-some-odd pages by this Friday night!
The Professor Is In
The spring semester is wrapped. The highlights of last week were seeing my Clinic team give a great presentation highlighting the work they’ve done and sitting through a day of excellent final presentations from students in E80. Very proud of what my students accomplished this semester!
Leisure Line
Last week we went to the Hollywood Bowl for the opening night of the Netflix is a Joke Fest. Fun to see some great comics in person: Sebastian Maniscalco, Nate Bargatze, Jim Gaffigan, and Jerry Seinfeld.
Still Life
Welcome to Los Angeles, where you can find a variety of colorful birds in the trees of your neighborhood.
Whole hearted agreement here. As a fellow prof, and one influenced by the personalist Dorothy Day, this vision of education is a humanized one that is more labor intensive but far better for students and faculty alike.
I like this distinction between "personal" and "personalized" learning. In addition to the points you make about the benefits of friction, it makes me think about the emphasis on the individual vs. the communal: Part of what education (in a school setting) entails is learning together. Personalized learning can meet an individual's specific needs, which can be good (there are certainly moments when the communal emphasis of the classroom holds a student back or leaves them behind.) But the personal space of the classroom allows students to learn from one another in unexpected ways, ways that I imagine a personalized curriculum could never anticipate.