When shortcuts trump curiosity, education loses its purpose
Muhammad Hamid Zaman
I still remember when several of my science teachers, both in matric and in FSc, would skip certain chapters in the text, not because they did not contain useful information, or because they were not central for understanding the subject, but simply because the material in those chapters was unlikely to appear in the exam.
The teachers had seen sufficient exams to know what topics were likely to appear or not. And they were almost always right. My teachers wanted students to focus on what was relevant – not from an educational perspective – but from the perspective of exam success. At that time, I found this strategy to be quite appropriate and much to my liking. I had to cram less material and not focus on things that were extraneous to my success. The only goal of a class, in my immature mind, was to do well in an exam, and my teachers were helping me achieve that goal. It was all about efficiency and success, not actual learning.
Apparently, my experience was not unique. A friend, who had gone to a well-regarded engineering university in the country, jokingly remarked years later that he was a pretty good civil engineer, except that he could not do bridge construction projects, as his teacher had skipped the sections on beams, because no final paper had asked a question on beams for the past several years! Why learn something that you won’t be tested on?
Years later, I would struggle with topics that we skipped in my high school curriculum because I lacked the basics. I had to relearn material that should have been familiar. That efficiency strategy of my teachers would cost me way too many hours and headaches in later years.
Some three decades later, I am hearing similar arguments about efficiency and success from teachers in Pakistan. The focus, it seems, is still on ‘success’ instead of learning. A recent conversation with a group of teachers who have had nearly three decades of experience teaching biology, and have won numerous awards over the years, turned to the use of AI in high school biology classes. The teachers’ entire argument in support was that students are able to get answers faster and make fewer errors using AI tools. AI, in the teachers’ minds, was more efficiency-driven. I have heard from many other teachers and instructors, in communities near and far, that AI is a tool that is fast, accessible, and mostly free. AI will help their students succeed, so why not use it? The idea that AI is a tool and people need to be familiar with new tools is not a bad one. Indeed, we should all be aware of what is out there and try to understand how well these things work and their inherent limits. But what I have struggled with is where the actual learning of high school students fits in this whole “tool” narrative? How are we defining success? And why does success and learning have to be mutually exclusive? Finding answers quickly, some of which are inaccurate and problematic, is not what learning is about. Neither is having a system generate text that could be cut and pasted for an assignment that required actual and original work. Learning is not always easy or painless. Yet there is great joy in mastering a topic, in learning from mistakes, and in tracing back one’s steps, figuring out what has been missed. There is also the finite chance of stumbling upon new insights and having eureka moments. All of these things make learning the most precious part of our lives.
When teachers tell students to take the easy road only, they take away the immense joy that comes from figuring out the hard stuff after a serious effort, and worse, rob them of the chance to make an original discovery, no matter how small. And in doing so, they weaken the very foundation of education: the opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes.
The author is a Professor and the Director of Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University
TET
