Lighting the fire of learning in the age of AI

Today’s students live in two worlds, the human and the virtual. Can educators use the potential of large language models to enrich and expand students’ learning?

At a Glance (click to reveal)

• The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing, but it’s unclear how much it is expanding human knowledge.
• Humans learn by making connections in ways that AI cannot replicate.
• The kinds of experiences that promote these connections require students to experiment and explore.
• Forward-thinking educators have encouraged such innovations as project-based and inquiry learning to promote deeper learning.
• AI can enhance these learning experiences, but it cannot replace human connections.

After we have made all the cultural knowledge available with only a few keystrokes, and after we have built robots that can outthink and outperform us, both of which initiatives are already underway, what will be left for humanity? There is only one answer: We will choose to retain the uniquely messy, self-contradictory, internally conflicted endless creative humans that exist today. (Wilson, 2014, p 118)

We write the story of our lives together

We are living in the greatest knowledge explosion in human history. We can see to the very edge of unknown eternities, decode the fundamental designs of life, communicate around the world in seconds, and create machines that process information at the speed of light. We are at the very beginning of a new era of human cognition and consciousness.

Wisdom traditions tell us that the story of our life is a journey to our true self. But none of us take that journey alone. Each of us is one point in a story we write together. There may or may not be a collective unconscious, as the psychologist and social theorist Carl Jung hypothesized, but the human mind itself is universal — we all love, dream, and fear.

Today, we face a revolution in machine learning that can either expand the human mind and its creative powers or it can diminish those powers by, in the words of E.O. Wilson (2014), outthinking and outperforming us. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a mutation of our own making; the speed at which it processes massive amounts of data is nothing less than astounding, but is it really enhancing thought and enriching thinking?

I asked Microsoft Copilot, one of the new AI chatbots, a standard history question: “What were the causes of World War I?” In less than a heartbeat I got an answer with a cheerful, tidy conclusion:

In summary, a complex web of historical, political, and social factors converged, ultimately leading to World War I. If you’d like more details or have additional questions, feel free to ask!

Not a bad answer, but a shade superficial. Here is what my grandfather, who fought in World War I, wrote to his mother in 1915:

The shell fire was simply hellish, shrapnel bursting all around me when I went for reinforcements at 11 a.m., never touched going or returning although men all around me were falling every second! The strain and sights were indescribable.

He survived, but millions did not.

The thinking human and artificial mind

Today, our students live in two worlds, the human and the virtual. Closing the distance between human experience and the world according to AI is the learning challenge of our era. Is there a way to bridge the gap? Can we create a teaching and learning landscape that is holistic, authentic, and available to all for solving the challenges barreling toward us in an unstable and unpredictable world? Can AI help us on our journey?

The machine mind learns by accumulating facts; humans learn by doing, through trial and error and reflection. What will the future look like if human ingenuity and imagination are overshadowed by a valueless generator of facts, half-facts, and fables? AI can name the causes of World War I, but it has little sense of what war means to those who experience it. Humans read for meaning, for emotional recognition, and for original ideas. If we hand over learning to algorithms, we could fall off a very steep cliff of ignorance built on disembodied facts and secondhand information.

AI is here and not going away. Will we use the potential of large language models to enrich and expand students’ learning, or will we allow AI to swallow us whole, turning education into a mindless game of Trivial Pursuit?

If we embrace the principles revealed by the new science of learning and development and pair them with a deep belief that all children can learn, AI can be a tool for designing learning experiences that engage today’s students to stretch their intellects and contribute to the story of us. But we need to proceed with care. We cannot outsource thinking, we cannot rent a brain, and we cannot hand over the fate of the earth to the computer scientists organizing the thinking of the digital mind.

The stakes are very high. The economist Nouriel Roubini (2022) warns us that the future will be shaped by how we meet the “megathreat” challenges awaiting us. These megathreats include massive debt, AI, automation, geopolitical clashes among great powers, inflation, income and wealth inequalities, pandemics, and climate change. I would add to this list in big and bold letters, the preservation of democracy. We dare not stop thinking for ourselves.

Creating classrooms where minds grow in abundance

Richard Gregory (2004), editor of the Oxford Companion to the Mind, defines the mind as “the universe in our heads — reaching out to explore the physical reality, creating myths and music, arts and science — struggling to understand the world out there and itself.” Our minds are marvelously complex and mysterious. The rocket fuel that ignites the fire of learning is the freedom to experiment, the courage to be ourselves, and the willingness to fail again and again until at last we succeed. We are born curious and inventive. We connect naturally with others. If the universe in our heads is to be one of beauty, imagination, and compassion, we need multiple opportunities to experiment and share our humanity with others in settings of safety, care, and compassion. If we can create these settings, we need not fear AI. In fact, we should invite it to join us in the joyful search for the truth.

I recognized that lighting the fire of learning is the heart and soul of teaching during my first teaching job, which was at a rural high-poverty school in western Massachusetts. Many of my students experienced deep poverty. They often were hungry, and many worked after school in low-paying jobs to help their families get by. Many failed to finish high school. But they showed up, even if they had to walk to school on a cold New England morning. They tried hard in class. They wanted to learn. They wanted nice clothes. They wanted what every kid wants. The fire of hope burned deep in their hearts.

I was one of two 5th-grade social studies teachers. My colleague taught an American history class; I was assigned to teach Man: A Course of Study, an experimental anthropological studies course designed by the famous child psychologist Jerome Bruner. Over the year, students learned about the life of the Netsilik, an Indigenous people from the Far North of Canada.

Frankly, I was clueless about how to teach this course. The class materials were very sophisticated, and my kids came from homes where books were in short supply. But they were eager to learn. We decided to turn our classroom into a living museum. We painted the walls and windows to look like a Netsilik village, complete with igloos, polar bears, reindeer, and a piercing blue northern sky lit by a huge yellow sun.

Every student was a member of the village with a name and a role to play. The students kept journals about their lives, families, hopes, and fears. Soon, the Netsilik people were no longer the “other”: They were real people with real lives in real places. And we had lots of fun and laughter — often failing to sit in one place for 45 minutes. Some of my more conservative colleagues reported me to the principal, who poked his head in the classroom, looked around, smiled, and left without a word.

Now, 30 years later, those 5th graders are adults, many with children of their own and holding positions of responsibility. When they see me, all they want to talk about is our famous experiment with freedom and creativity. We had stumbled upon education’s forgotten purpose — we had touched our shared humanity and forged a learning bond that lasted a lifetime.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to teach Man: A Course of Study today. Could AI help us to be even more creatively messy and adventurous? I believe an educationally astute use of AI could have enhanced our class in several ways. We could have created an online community with the Netsilik people. AI could have helped my students learn more about the ecology of the extreme North and replicate a Netsilik village. Its ability to translate languages could have helped us reach out to other Indigenous people in Canada and ask how they were surviving the spread of European culture and climate change. They, in turn, would have learned more about us, thus enabling us all to share in our humanity together. Man: A Course of Study could have matured into a virtual community with a forward-looking and inclusive title such as The Promise of People.

Preparing students for the future

A decade ago, the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Think Tank (Denomy & Perry, 2014) organized a meeting of distinguished scholars to identify what students would have to know and be able to achieve in the 21st century:

• Critical thinking and problem solving. For high-skilled, high-paid jobs, students need to be able to engage in non-routine thinking and solve complex problems.
• Creativity and innovation. Employers want individuals who think outside of the box and develop new solutions to complex problems.
• Collaboration. The workforce of the future will be diverse and globally distributed, and individuals must be able to collaborate.
• Question formulation. Ideal employees can formulate and ask appropriate questions that show higher-order thinking.
• Global awareness. In the past, students have been somewhat isolated. Employers now want students with a sense of what’s going on around the world.
• Communication skills. Solid oral and written communication skills also are essential and often lacking today.
• Technology skills. All students need to be comfortable with, and able to use, technology.

If students are going to acquire the skills, values, and dispositions described above, we are going to need a new approach to teaching and learning that is based on human capacities, needs, and dreams. We need not fear our messy creativity. Deeper learning flowers when inquiry and discovery are encouraged and celebrated.

A new grammar of learning

While the principles of learning are steadfast, the grammar of learning has been changed forever by the growth of technology. More than 20 years ago, when the World Wide Web still felt new, the co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning, John Seely Brown (2000), identified four dimensions of learning and described how they are shifting in the digital age:

• Dimension 1: Literacy. According to Brown, “The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian — to know how to navigate through the confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so.” (p. 14)
• Dimension 2: Learning. Formal, authority-based, lecture-oriented schooling is rapidly becoming an educational fossil. Students today learn through discovery.
• Dimension 3: Non-linear reasoning. Brown calls this bricolage, a term the famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used to describe a form of reasoning that has more to do with assembly than laying out things and ideas in a single straight line.
• Dimension 4: A bias toward action. Students today have little patience with waiting to see how things work, they want to jump right in and experiment. They like to tinker, muck around, and see what works.

To some of us, Brown’s far-seeing description of the new grammar of learning might sound subversive, like science fiction — no antiquated loyalty to form over substance, no textbooks, no sages on the stage. But as it turns out, this is the way students learn today.

A future-forward model

One of the most successful high schools in the country is High Tech High (HTH) in San Diego, California. The school’s quietly revolutionary educational philosophy is built on four principles:

• Equity
• Personalization
• Authentic work
• Collaborative design

High Tech High students engage in discovery projects that bring together these ideas and demonstrate the new grammar of learning at work. These are a few of their projects, as described on the HTH website:

• A Fight with Gravity: Students conducted physics experiments attempting to fight gravity using kites, balloons, and other flying objects.
• Planting Community: Students learned about agriculture, biology, food production, and the environment and worked in groups to create large mobile planters for kindergarten classes.
• Explodation: Students created representations comparing artistic movements to show the evolution of art in Western civilization.
• Chemistry and Conflict: Pairs of students studied a specific molecule and its role in history and created art pieces that they compiled into a book.
• Spaceship Earth: Students attempted to start their own HTH NASA by learning about astro-photography and earth science and building weather balloons and rockets.

These projects have the ring of the future about them. A thoughtful partnership with AI could enrich such projects in a new model of teaching and learning designed to ignite a love of learning and speed us to a vision of education that nurtures hearts and minds while preparing young learners to succeed in a complex and ever-changing world.

What would Socrates say?

The quote “to find yourself, think for yourself” is often attributed to Socrates. If we offshore our minds to the cloud, will we ever be able to solve the deeply human problems rocketing around the planet? What will become of our shared humanity? What will become of the human spirit?

I wonder what Socrates would say if he happened upon Microsoft Copilot. When I asked my new AI pal to define the purpose of education, in less than a second came a reply,

In summary, education is about more than just imparting knowledge, it’s a holistic process that enriches lives and strengthens communities.

Had the brain from Microsoft graduated from Wikipedia to John Dewey? Maybe not all is lost, maybe AI can help us light the fire of learning.

Still, I think it’s important to remember that shared intelligence and community are the signature strengths of our species. Sitting alone with a computer without authentic human communication is the gateway drug to a deeply sad social solipsism that goes beyond simple physical distancing. Connectivity without connection lacks the energy needed to light our cranial fires.

Socrates liked nothing better than swapping ideas over a cup of wine with real people. It is hard to unwind and think freely with a billion facts in conversation with themselves. We write the story of us together. AI can listen in, but we the people will continue to talk among ourselves, even if we don’t always make mathematical sense.

References

Brown, J.S. (2000, March/April) Growing up digital: How the web changes work, education, and the way people learn. Change, pp. 10-20.

Denomy, V.L. & Perry, M. (2014). Education for the 21st century: Executive summary. Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Gregory, R.L. (Ed.). (2004). The Oxford companion to the mind. Oxford University Press.

Roubini, N. (2022). Megathreats: Ten dangerous trends that imperil our future, and how to survive them. Little, Brown.

Wilson, E.O. (2014). The meaning of human existence. W.W. Norton & Company.

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This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 5-6, pp. 25-29.