Inside Higher Ed
We have an artificial intelligence problem in education right now, and it’s one we need to address candidly. Peel away the claims of inevitability, innovation and “progress” (all claims that can be easily challenged, by the way) and we can see more clearly the dangers of AI, both for students and for society more broadly. Left unchecked, AI can undermine democracy—not in spite of its use in schools and colleges, but precisely because of its prevalence in classrooms around the country. To understand why, we need to turn to Paulo Freire, one of the most important educational theorists of the 20th century.
In his 1968 manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire powerfully describes how authoritarian governments use their educational systems as weapons to ensure the people remain submissive and do not question the power structures in place. Such governments fear that critical reasoning can lead to unrest and revolution, so they mandate both the curriculum itself and the teaching strategies used in classrooms to ensure obedience by eliminating anything that might cultivate higher-order thinking skills.
Freire refers to this oppressive pedagogy as the “banking concept” and explains that the purpose of this approach is to transform education into “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” He goes on to outline key attributes of the banking concept like lecturing, rigid hierarchies and a lack of student agency. Importantly, Freire argues that even well-meaning teachers can fall into the banking approach, because they are not able or are not willing to scrutinize the expectations placed upon them.
Freire shows us how this model of teaching is, at the very least, dehumanizing for students, who come to see themselves as objects to be acted upon rather than “transformers of that world.” This outcome, taken entirely on its own, would be the antithesis of a meaningful education. Taken further, though, the stifling of creativity and cognitive ingenuity can ultimately lead to the kind of apathy and submission that serve the purposes of authoritarians who wish to exert absolute control.
The banking concept is only one example of a pedagogical approach that can also be used as a tool of subjugation, though. We can observe the same levers of oppression at work in any aspect of education that is promoted by political leaders and that also serves to anesthetize critical thinking.
Given this framing, it is possible to see the use of AI in the classroom as a new pedagogy of the oppressed. AI is being loudly promoted by the government of the United States as well as school and college administrators everywhere, and we also have more research than ever before to show that students who use AI to perform challenging cognitive tasks (like summarizing, brainstorming, analyzing, arguing effectively, etc.) learn less deeply over time. More problematically, by outsourcing the hard work of thinking to AI, it is possible that many might never fully develop these cognitive skills in the first place. College students are as susceptible to these detrimental effects as younger students.
That, dear readers, is a recipe for disaster—both for students as individuals and for our society over time. Like the banking model Freire abhorred, AI can turn students into the authors of their own diminishment by weakening their abilities to think for themselves and by significantly dehumanizing the work of education over all. It can also deepen systemic educational inequities in ways that will further contribute to the debasement of students and schools.
Perhaps our political and educational leaders simply consider this collective deterioration of thinking skills to be collateral damage in the service of administrative FOMO and the race to see who can innovate the fastest.
But Freire points us to another, darker possibility as well. An authoritarian government, or an aspiring one, might find in this cognitive decline a desirable outcome. The rapid encroachment of AI into our schools, colleges and universities forces us to confront the prospect of the systematized oppression Freire warned us about so long ago, even if there are some rare contexts where AI might be used by an exceptional teacher to enhance learning.
Is this really what we want? To sacrifice the humanizing power of education for a technocratic vision of an automated and obedient society? I don’t think so, and I’m willing to bet there are many who agree with me. The answer to this problem, then, is rooted in the soil of AI resistance. In their rallying cry for resistance, Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J. Nygren point to ways we can push back against the widespread infiltration of AI into our educational spaces by centering students and talking to colleagues. Most importantly, they urge us to reject, at every opportunity, the very premise that AI has any place at all in education today.
That strikes me as wise, actionable advice. Safeguarding the project of education, the mission of our institutions and the bedrock of our democracy demands that we first refuse the terms and the rationale that have been presented to us as unassailable. From there, we do as Freire did: We teach our students to think freely, to engage important questions, to turn a critical and inquisitive lens on their own educational journeys.
Some readers may think I doth protest too much here. But I think the larger issue is that we haven’t been protesting enough—and the consequences of that failure could be enormous.
