American Teachers Don't Want AI in Classrooms, here's why!

Despite AI as the future of education, the number of teachers complaining about the negative effects of AI on learners is increasing.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times published by Jessica Grose highlights some of the issues that teachers go through as they try to adapt to the ever-changing technological environment the fact that AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini could generate false information that's totally irrelevant to the main topic.

Some of the possible disadvantages are that students are more reliant on AI assistance in brainstorming and writing, which results in the weakening of such skills as critical thinking and problem-solving.

American Teachers Don't Want AI in Classrooms!

Here's why:

Some teachers, such as North Carolina’s Leila Wheless, know the problems of AI in classrooms at first-hand. Her students, who used AI to search for information, produced preposterously wrong information, showing no critical thought and no endurance.

“For one particular assignment related to the novel ‘Persepolis,’ I had students research prophets,” Jessica Grose wrote what Leila Wheless explained to her.

These are the concerns of Sarah Martin, an English teacher in a California high school. She notes that students no longer engage themselves in solving complex problems since the solutions are easily available through AI.

Here's what she shared with Jessica Grose:

“Cheating by copying from A.I. is rampant, particularly among my disaffected seniors who are just waiting until graduation.” Sarah Martin wrote this to Jessica Grose.

This, she thinks, is producing learners who cannot cope with their tasks and who cannot stick it out until they complete the task using AI and not their own brains.

It is noteworthy that some educators recognize the possible advantages of AI in increasing the rate of some tasks to be completed on time, but the disadvantages are rather considerable.

Taking a step further to make schools ban AI in the classrooms, she shared that only 6 percent of American school teachers believe that AI tools are actually beneficial for students and not harmful at all.

• Yes, this means 94% of American teachers don’t believe in AI tools being used in classrooms for so many reasons such as hallucination, no fact-checking, wrong information, misleading context and so much more.

However, the policymakers themselves appear to be unduly positive about the possibilities of AI, some of whom have staked millions on AI-based educational technologies without thinking of the dangers.

If we talk about the role of AI in education, it is high time to find the middle ground in the heated discussion as AI can be used in online education as well as offline educational activities purposely, it should not override vital human contact and teaching.

It is therefore important that educators are armed with the potential strategies that could be used to maximize the positive impacts of AI while at the same time avoiding the vices that are associated with it.

The effectiveness of AI in education will therefore depend on the way that it is applied and whether or not it complements the key learning outcome areas in classrooms and beyond that.