ChatGPT is an incredible cheat when asking children to write summaries.
Similar is the discussion in Will Douglas Heaven’s recent article in MIT Technology Review. That’s true. As a speech pathologist and lecturer at Harvard University, I’ve worked with many children who struggle with reading and writing and want computers to write and think for them. But while it’s easy to say that ChatGPT marks the end of education, the real story is not so simple.
Many articles have already discussed how ChatGPT and other large-scale language models can be used to improve education. But we can actually do more important things. We can take advantage of this new revolution to rethink how we envision our children’s success.
Rather than single-mindedly and mechanically helping our children rise through the ranks, we need to think about education and dig deeper into who we are and what they are as human beings. We can ask them to connect their knowledge and values and think aloud about what they are interested in, what excites them, what their fears and concerns are. We can appreciate them in ways that we recognize their unique and developing thinking skills.
We must also think differently about schools as places of heart-mind integration, rather than mere rehash and analysis of information. In fact, our concern that children might cheat on summary activities is symptomatic of a problem. In this age of constant Google searches, why do we focus on children’s ability to simply repeat what they read?
We know that summarizing is an important way to support reading comprehension, but if we stop there, children will never understand why the information is important and what the purpose of reading is. I will be left alone. This problem is exacerbated by how we often introduce our children to reading material. I often have my children read one of her sentences or news stories, answer questions about it, and then move on to another story. One article or sentence does not necessarily lead to the last article or sentence. And perhaps neither has anything to do with the real life of children.
When children say they are not interested in reading, even if they have the skills, it may be because we are not tapping into their intrinsic interests and needs. I have seen this with my 6 year old son. Although he has above average reading comprehension, he often avoids when asked to focus on reading a simple story. By contrast, when he was allowed to choose a book about the species of his favorite animals, snakes and sharks, he often brought the book to the dinner table and asked, “Is this the correct way to read it?” increase. or “Wait a minute, I didn’t understand this word.”
Other kids may feel the same way about graphic novels and books that explore deep-sea diving and mountaineering. If you want your children to become more and more robotic, you can continue to focus on giving all children the same books. We could go a little further and focus on differentiating books based on children’s reading levels. But all of this does not serve the true purpose of helping children read and learn. In short, we want our children to develop full humanity, to appreciate and understand the humanity of others. We want our children to act more like themselves rather than like computers.
Raising children this way requires a complete rethinking of how we think about child success. Such visions include thinking more about children’s ability to judge the ethics of situations, apply empathy in difficult times, and explore the short- and long-term consequences of their actions. This requires helping children understand what it means to be compassionate and how to perceive and support well-being and the well-being of others and themselves. That means helping people develop the skills to deal with complex intergenerational challenges, such as the environmental crisis and, ironically, the benefits and dangers of AI. And, most fundamentally, to help them understand what it means to genuinely love and care for others, and what it means to know and love their true selves. It is included. Instead of diving further into the airbrushed world of Instagram images, we need to help them love and cherish their authentic reality.
Different assessments will also be needed at school and at home. We need to focus on the quality of our conversations in terms of how they support empathy, compassion and critical thinking. We need to emphasize that daily conversations reveal how much children understand and how they feel. We probably need to move away from data-driven metrics like “How often does this kid raise his hand?” And towards introspective listening that focuses on what children are trying to convey.
To be clear, it’s not that you shouldn’t notice if your children are raising their hands. We should be aware, just as we should be aware if we have missed a class. We know that by raising a hand or speaking, we can tell how hard our students are working. We also want all children, especially those from marginalized communities and those whose families have historically been silenced, to feel welcomed in their contributions and heard. We also know that helping is important. The problem arises when you focus too much on metrics like moves and comments. Over time, you might come to think of these metrics as proxies for quality of learning. We may come to see children as notable data points in their inputs and outputs, rather than as developing, relational beings.
With the holistic development of the student in mind, ChatGPT or similar programs could be used to support the learning of students of all ages. In fact, it would be a shame not to. For example, you can use ChatGPT to ask children to generate multiple solutions to a problem and evaluate how well the results and discussions of those solutions are done. More fundamentally, you can ask how well their values and feelings align with these solutions. or “Who are you worried about getting hurt by such an argument?” You can analyze which elements are missing and which elements may have been omitted.
In the words of Will Douglas Haven, the author of the above article, “ChatGPT will not destroy education, it will change it.” We can take a more radical stance. increase. We must change our beliefs about education and success in this brave new world. It may sound exaggerated, but children’s humanity depends on it.
Rebecca Rowland is speech pathologist and Part-time lecturer on education at Harvard University. She is the author of The Art of Talking with Children.
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