Can artificial intelligence spark an education renaissance?

After trying to improve how to cut string beans in a hotel restaurant in his teenage years, Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1985) noted, “I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world” (p. 29). The same is true in school. Real, transformative improvement has defied reformers for decades.

In every decade, there are calls to fix the supposed problems pervading schools and classrooms, but the remedies are typically reworked or enhanced versions of the very practices that created the reported problems in the first place. Scholars have cited a long list of reasons to explain why, including complex systems, wrong-headed policy makers, change-averse teachers, ineffective school leaders, obstructive parents, ill-conceived curricula, inadequate facilities and resources, and so on. Numerous publications have discussed these and other factors that limit schools’ ability to change (Beycioglu & Kondakci, 2021; Cuban, 2013; Goodlad, 1990; Oakes, 1986; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Yet changes must happen for schools to better serve our children.

Education needs a renaissance, and artificial intelligence (AI) may provide the kind of jolt needed. It could open possibilities for different approaches that could change roles for students, teachers, and leaders in ways that were only dreamed about in the past. And AI as we currently know it, with all the amazing things that are emerging, is likely dumber today than it will be at any time in the future. What it will be capable of in the future is anybody’s guess.