This week, Axios published an article showing that AI generated 52% of articles on the internet. By next year, that could be 90% (Thank you to Shawn Healy from iCivics for bringing this article to my attention). AI isn’t stopping; its growth is exponential. This begs the question: what are we doing to prepare students for an AI-integrated world?
The Context
Before we dive in, a disclaimer is in order. Thinking Nation uses AI as a core part of our supplemental curriculum platform. We use it in a narrow sense. We provide feedback on student writing and producing data reports for teacher analysis on historical thinking and writing. In an education system where teachers are overworked and take on far more responsibilities than merely teaching; or that same world where teachers are human beings with lives and families beyond school walls; or again, in that same world where teachers are still pushed by state standards to cover content instead of empowering students with tools and dispositions within our historical discipline, we believe that AI can remove real hurdles in the process of centering historical thinking as the foundation of our classrooms.
That being said, we believe that schools and organizations like ourselves should exercise real caution and restraint when it comes to adopting AI technologies. As I wrote in the introduction to the CivxNow report, Unchartered Waters: Education, Democracy, and Social Cohesion in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, “As a community, we must be willing to honestly think through the various uses of AI and its implications in order to successfully wield its power without compromising our own humanity.” Education should make us more human. It should cultivate our humanity. If we relinquish our own creativity to artificial intelligence, we are giving up one of the fundamental characteristics of what makes us uniquely human.
The Solution: Historical Thinking
With that context in mind, let’s bring it back to the question: how do we prepare students for an AI-integrated world? I know I sound like a broken record, but my answer is simple: teach them to think historically.
As an education culture we have chased web literacy, media literacy, and now AI-literacy. But each of these contain core principles that have not changed. They require that students contextualize the information they read, practice sourcing to identify origin, perspective, and credibility, as well as evaluate the evidence and arguments being made. Historical thinking skills do all of this, and more. Historical thinking also centers humanity by requiring that we exhibit intellectual, or historical, empathy, for those we engage with.
Historical thinkers crave human voice and experience. We are dissatisfied with the sterile and uniform dictates of algorithms. Historical thinking is an antidote to a world described and summarized by artificial intelligence. Historical thinking humanizes us.
At Thinking Nation our mission is to empower students to thrive as engaged and critical thinkers. Equipping them with the tools and dispositions that make up historical thinking does this. These skills transcend our classrooms and celebrate the process of thinking over the result of knowledge. Our thinking slows down and we don’t engage in a rat race of content creation but rather the process of idea deliberation. We become more human.
We may not be able to slow the tide of AI ubiquity on the internet. But, we can create small bastions of humanity in our classrooms where we prioritize deep thinking, sincere questioning, and robust conversations. Thinking Nation works with schools across the country to equip teachers to do just this. Are you looking to prepare students for an AI-integrated world in such a way that privileges their own humanity? We’d love to work with you and support you as you empower your students. Connect with us to learn the various ways we support teachers and schools.