The best-case scenario for AI in schools

I'll be honest: I find the ways in which AI is changing our world to be a bit scary. It's getting harder to tell what's real and what's fake. It's unclear what jobs will exist in a few years. But more than anything, I worry about our kids – and whether a full-on embrace of AI could harm their ability to read deeply, write clearly and think critically.

A lot of parents I know are talking about AI and education. They see the same headlines that I do: some students are using it to cheat, some teachers are using it to increase efficiency and some school districts are fully embracing it, even though we don't have a ton of reliable data on whether chatbots help or harm students' learning.

So, amid my worries about AI in the classroom, I called up Sal Khan, author of Brave New Words.

Many of you may know him as the founder of Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit that's grown into an empire of online videos and tools which many students (my own children included) use when they're struggling to understand a topic in class.

I wanted to talk to him because he's one of the most prominent voices making an optimistic case for how AI could improve our classrooms in a meaningful way. He's not blind to the fears that many parents have, but hearing him make a positive case for this technology was eye-opening.

I really enjoyed our conversation – if you have a moment, you should watch (or read) some more of it below.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Katty Kay: For parents, there is quite a lot of fear that their kids' brains are going to get outsourced and that everything will be done by ChatGPT. Paint the picture of how you envision AI as an enabler in education. What are classrooms going to look like in 10 years time?

Sal Khan: First of all, those fears are real. They're legitimate fears. What I always like to do before I go into what's going to happen with the technology is to think about what some of the goals of writing and reading were in the first place. I think if you talk to an English teacher, they'll say it's important to be able to communicate and structure your thoughts. I think when you break it out like that, you can start to think of ways to not only address some of the fears with AIs, but maybe even do things better than you did before.

The example I'll give is one where I actually won't talk about technology at all. Imagine if your child's school district just discovered $1bn (£743m) and they decided to hire some amazing graduate students to hang out in the classroom. These graduate students are going to be on call for your teacher to help grade papers, to help bounce ideas and think of really creative lesson plans.

When class starts, those grad students, along with the teacher, are going to be able to walk around and help your children when they need it. They don't have to wait for that help. And then, they'll report back to the teacher and say, 'Hey, I noticed Katty is not as engaged as she was yesterday' or 'Sal's really engaged today. Did you know that he's really into baseball? Let's make the next example about that just for Sal.' And then, they're able to distill all of that and communicate to the parents. It's not once a term. It's almost real time.

I think that would be everyone's dream. The students would love it, the teachers would love it and parents would love it. And that's essentially what's going to happen with AI. Obviously, it's not going to be human teaching assistants; it's going to be artificial intelligences that are assisting the teachers that are able to observe the classroom and intervene while keeping the teacher in the loop.

KK: We are talking about a world where AI takes over the roles of doctors and other jobs. So, why will a teacher's role in a classroom still even be something that we would seek to retain in a world where AI can do almost everything better?

SK: I think we're in a world where we're going to be able to raise the floor and create a much better high-scale, low-cost, automated safety net for the world.

Take your doctor example. If you're in a rural village in India, you'll hopefully get an AI doctor that maybe can even help prescribe medicines and things like that. It won't be as good as the doctors you or I might be able to go to, but it'll be a lot better than what they had before.

Similarly, your children might be able to get access to an AI tutor or AI assessments. The reason why I don't think that is the end all and be all is the same reason why a lot of parents, including myself, feel the need to send their kids to a physical school with other kids and with a social environment, etc.

We often focus a lot on just the standards of what happens in school: Can kids factor a polynomial? Can they grammatically correct a sentence? Those skills matter. But to some degree, the more important skills are: Can you deal with conflict? Can you be held accountable? Can you communicate? Can you know how to navigate social pressures?

I think teachers, as a human being in the room, are going to be super-important actors as a physical human being to hold students accountable, but also just to be able to unlock that person-to-person connection.

KK: Is it possible that because the tools will be so much better, we will unlock in all students that kind of joy of learning that most of us don't really feel when we're in middle school?

SK: I think we'll do much, much better than we have in the past. I think the reason why most students disengage is because things are going over their head or it's not really connecting to their experiences in life. AI will get us a much better chance of personalising to those students.

When you interact with content, you're much more likely to learn and remember the content.

We have activities on our AI tool, Khanmigo, where you can talk to AI simulations of historical figures or literary characters. That literally brings history to life in ways that we couldn't have imagined before.

To your question, about five, 10 years in the future, this sounds very Star Trek-y, but virtual-reality glasses are probably going to become mainstream in about 10 years. It literally would be like a magic school bus ride where the teacher is going to be able to take the class into the circulatory system, or we're going to be able to go to ancient Rome together. I think that will be a much, much richer way to learn.

KK: So, is it that AI could actually enhance our ability not to learn for learning's sake, but that it could also make us more creative? Is that how you see this?

SK: I think it will amplify whatever your intent already is. There are people who are just trying to do things as quickly as possible and cut corners. They will find ways to do that with AI. Now, those people usually aren't the highest performers and when you amplify that with AI, they still won't be the highest performers. But for those that are looking to do something novel and creative, I think it will amplify that, as well.

I have a commencement address that I have to give and I am using AI – not to write the address, but I just dictated all my thoughts onto my phone and AI transcribed it. Then, I started tweaking it. I went paragraph by paragraph and was like, 'Is there another way of saying this?'

I'm not using 99% of what the AI might suggest, but just having that partner there is very powerful. I'm also bouncing ideas off of my 16-year-old son and my wife. They're not always around!

Imagine you're someone who gives great speeches, like Barack Obama. As president, he had an army of speechwriters. But I believe that he also came to the table with his own point of view. So, he was able to prompt those speechwriters so it would be in his voice, but also edit it himself so that it would truly be authentic to himself and his ideas.

I think these technologies now give us all that power that President Obama had. But if you don't write well, if you don't communicate well, it's going to have diminishing returns.

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