This is Part 6 of a series on AI in education. See Part 1 here.

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (later immortalized by Walt Disney), a trainee makes a broom fetch water for him while his magic-using teacher is away. But the apprentice never learned how to stop the spell. Disaster ensues, as the broom multiplies and floods the place until the sorcerer returns and puts an end to the spell and mayhem. The lesson is clear: Let something do the work for you, and/or only work on pieces of your craft, and you never learn important skills.

Centuries later, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), that lesson is especially pertinent. If students let AI do all the work for them in school, they miss out on important practice that builds vital skills like writing and critical thinking. Yet if students don't learn to leverage AI, they won't be prepared for their future careers, as industries are already folding AI into their operations. This creates a conundrum, but one that savvy educators can navigate. I had the pleasure of interviewing an expert on this topic and a visionary in the field of cybernetics. Thompson Morrison, author and co-founder of Catalyst Learning Labs, works with primary and secondary schools to help unleash their creative potential. His answers follow each question below.

Jenny Grant Rankin: What does it mean when students use AI "as a crutch," and what happens when students come to depend on it?

Thompson Morrison: A recent study from MIT’s Media Lab has ricocheted around the news outlets. In that study, Your Brain on ChatGPT, researchers studied the impact of using AI for essay writing with students from five colleges. The results were troubling; there was a significant decline in neural activity and retention by those students who depended on LLMs for writing. In other words, their level of thinking decreased. The warning from this study is real: if we continually offload tasks that typically require deep thinking to a computer, we run the real risk of decreasing our own capacity as thinkers and creative problem solvers.

This is not OK. Almost every day we are hearing of companies that are firing employees and replacing their work with AI agents. We are at a point of history where we sense a profound transformation afoot. We can’t crawl under a rock and pretend that the AI genie hasn’t been released. Instead, as educators, we are now challenged to courageously reimagine how we are preparing our students for this new reality, empowering them to leverage AI to develop new human potential as creative thinkers.

JGR: Why is it important for a teacher to have clear intentions when using AI in a classroom?

TM: Traditional education has its roots in 19th-century Prussia. These schools sought to develop uniform social behavior and encourage logical thinking skills that would be useful for both the military and an emergent industrial economy. Education leaders such as George Eliot brought this model back to America. Today, our schools are still based on an industrial paradigm focused on compliant behavior and the efficient production of standardized products.

As educators are now being encouraged to bring AI into the classrooms, it’s essential for them to ask ‘why’ within the greater question of the ‘why’ of education. Listen to employers, and they will tell you that the graduating students don't have the capacity for the creative thinking they need. Listen to students and you will hear them tell you that what they are learning doesn’t feel relevant to their lives. Listen to teachers and they will tell you that there is little joy in teaching, leaving them drained and discouraged, many wanting to leave the profession.

As we reimagine education, we must shift our focus from academic production to cultivating the capacity for creative thinking. Only after we have shifted our focus can we powerfully explore AI in the classroom as a thinking tool to amplify our unique human potential for collective creativity.

Let us not forget that the original aspiration of our modern computing era, which led to the personal computer and the internet, was not ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) but ‘intelligence amplification’ (IA). This vision was first defined in a seminal paper published in 1960 by psychologist J.C.R Licklidder, Man-Computer Symbiosis, that asked how computers might help us think, not how the computer might think for us.

JGR: How can teachers use AI to amplify (rather than stunt) student thinking?

TM: Computers don’t feel, we do. All LLM models used in AI are based on linear thinking that mimics rational thought. Because humans have the capacity to feel, we have the unique ability to make associations with non-linear thinking that are shaped by our lived experiences.

It’s essential that this critical distinction is recognized by teachers. To amplify students as creative thinkers, teachers must develop learning environments that cultivate student curiosity and honor their individual lived experiences as they challenge them to grapple with new concepts in a curriculum.

By having students provocatively use AI to find connections between concepts and their own curiosities, students challenge their current cognitive models by feeling the sense of surprise. Teachers can then highlight that learner surprise, encouraging their students to go deeper into their learning in order to make personal meaning of it. When they do, in "aha!" moments, students get a huge dopamine rush, feeling the joy of authentic learning.

Here students are learning to think with AI, not having AI think for them.

JGR: What are your favorite ways to spark learning and excitement in a classroom where AI is being used?

TM: Walk into a classroom and ask students what they are curious about and you will likely be met with blank stares. It’s disheartening that our current education system, with its primary focus on the acquisition of standardized knowledge, has left most students disengaged and struggling to name their own curiosities, much less be able to create personal meaning with the knowledge they are expected to learn.

Teachers must start, then, by recultivating curiosity by modeling themselves as curious learners, ones who have the courage to ask why without knowing the answer. And to model surprise.

One practice that I love is when a teacher is genuinely surprised by something they have learned from a student, they pull a Post-it pad from their pocket, write it down and put it on a sheet for the class to see. And then for them to model wondering about that surprise, creating a provocative AI prompt with it, only to be surprised again from what they learn.

When learning becomes authentic, it is seen, heard, and felt by others.

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