AI's Existential Crisis in Education

· Sal Darji

I recently listened to this episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel about how AI is fueling an existential crisis in education, and it really resonated with me. The episode features interviews with teachers who are grappling with fundamental questions about their role and purpose in an AI-driven world.

One quote that particularly struck me:

“That idea that we don’t really understand AI yet, that a lot of people don’t know how it works, and that we have no long-term data about its effects in the classroom because it’s so new, well, that’s a really big point of contention that we heard from a lot of teachers.”

This captures a fundamental problem: we’re making decisions about integrating AI into education without understanding its long-term effects. We don’t have decades of research like we do with other educational interventions. We’re essentially running a massive, uncontrolled experiment on millions of students.

The podcast also highlights how we might be repeating past mistakes:

“It feels to me like we haven’t learned some key lessons, a lot of them very recent. One of those during the pandemic was the costs of unhuman teaching and learning. I worry that as we did with cell phones and over reliance on one-to-one devices, we’re going to wake up a decade or more from now and realize we jumped on a tech bandwagon that keeps kids tethered to screens, harms them and harms learning.”

The pandemic showed us the limits of screen-based learning, yet we’re now pushing AI tutors that would keep students even more tethered to devices.

The most powerful theme from the podcast is the question teachers keep asking: “What are we even doing here? What’s the point?”

When AI can write essays, solve problems, and answer questions, what’s left for human teachers? The answer, I think, is everything that matters most: understanding the student, building relationships, fostering curiosity, teaching critical thinking (not just problem-solving), and helping students to navigate the world as human beings, not just as test-takers.