Ep. 8 – Robots or gods: AI and Human Education
This is Episode 8 of the Consortium Podcast, an academic audio blog of Kepler Education.
In this episode, Scott Postma and Joffre Swait discuss the development of AI and what this means in light of giving our children a Human Education. The robots are coming and that’s not changing. But that shouldn’t concern Christians who educate their children to be human beings who know how to assess value and not just function as a cog in a rote society.
Writing is an example of this kind of distinction. Writing can formulaic, but it is also a very human exercise. Students who only learn to write formulaically as a job skill will see their job eventually replaced by a robot. Those who learn to be a cultivated human being and recognize writing is an expression of one’s humanness, will have nothing to fear. Soft skills like these cannot be replaced by a robot because they are fundamentally human and not replicable by AI.
This is the quote referenced in the podcast:
“For the civic educator, the task is to produce a particular kind of citizen; for the educator released from political goals, the end of education is less to shape students than to develop their reason and knowledge to such a degree that they are able to take personal responsibility for shaping themselves as free and independent individuals—thinking through their own views, cultivating their own tastes, developing their own life plans, and becoming unique people. Although it is comforting to think that in a democracy these two projects are complementary (we like to say that democracy is the form of government that values free and autonomous individuals), the open-endedness of the educational process is worrisome from the political perspective; the temptation is to try to produce an education with a known and satisfactory outcome. Free men and women are often a bit too unpredictable for the civic educator’s taste.” – Bob Pepperman Taylor, University of Vermont
This is the AI article referenced in the podcast.
You can also learn more about Kepler Education and the consortium of teachers who share this vision for student flourishing by visiting our website at https://kepler.education.
Or, visit the Consortium Blog at https://consortium.kepler.education/.
