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Could the AI Revolution Make School More Human?
An opportunity to rethink the purpose of education
GPT-4, the engine behind ChatGPT, performs better on our measurements of educational ability than almost every American high school student.
It got a 1410 on the SAT, which puts it in the top 5% of test-takers; it’s about as good at the test as the average Villanova student. It got a 5 (the highest possible score) on nine AP tests, in subjects ranging from art history to environmental science.
It’s better than a lot of adults, too — it scored in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam.
When these results came out earlier this year, people freaked out in much the same way as they had when they first saw generative AI writing passable five-paragraph essays. Essays were over! Education was dead!
Maybe.
I think that the advent of AI might open up an important choice for educators and parents. We can either try to get our children to be more like our robot overlords or we can make education more human.
Over the last few decades, I’d argue that education in the United States has become a more robotic endeavor.
In recent decades, politicians from both political parties have focused on only one benefit of education…
