Fourth and fifth graders at Alpha School in Austin, Texas, aren't just learning â they're pioneering education's new frontier. Every click and every keystroke is guided by artificial intelligence.
Students spend only two hours in the morning on science, math and reading, working at their own speed using personalized, AI-driven software.
Adults in the classroom are called guides, not teachers, and earn six-figure salaries. Their job is to encourage and motivate.
When asked if an algorithm replaces the expertise of a teacher, guide Luke Phillips said, "I don't think it's replacing, I think it's just working in tandem."
Afternoons at the school are different. Students tackle projects, learn financial literacy and public speaking â life skills that founder MacKenzie Price says are invaluable.
"There is such a huge advantage when students can be met at the level and pace of learning that is right for them," Phillips said.
Purposeful, conscious, effortful integration. Take what comes from outside, a book, a conversation, an AI output and do the work of making it yours. Test it against experience. Reconcile it with what you already believe. Change your mind when you must and know why you are changing it. Be able to trace the path.
This is authenticity. Not purity of origin. Purposeful integration.
A person who writes with AI is not less authentic than a person who writes alone. A person who cannot explain their reasoning, who has lost the thread of their own integration, who has become a conduit for unassimilated outputs, has lost something essential, regardless of tools.
AI has been the push. Not my focus.
As James Yoonil Auh recently put it in a University World News article, "The real scandal of AI in education is not plagiarism, but pedagogy already too shallow to survive it."
Schoolishness and "Doing School" have run rampant for a while, and have aliented students from their education.
The trick isn't to promote AI in every corner of our classrooms, but to chip away at the transactional model of education that has become entrenched in our educational system.
We need to think about:
We'll need to ask the big -- often uncomfortable -- questions about the dynamics in our classrooms.
