As the great migration back to school begins, Minister for Education Helen McEntee faces challenges on many fronts. Primary schools are underfunded, and some are close to bankruptcy. Morale is low in post-primary schools, and a threat of industrial action looms regarding senior cycle reform.
Both primary and post-primary schools are struggling to fill teaching posts and having to resort to employing unqualified people. Since Covid-19, the level of school avoidance, that is, prolonged absences from school due to emotional factors, is higher than it has ever been. Record numbers of students are wrestling with anxiety and depression.
Over the summer, online and broadcast debates arose about teachers leaving for New Zealand, Australia, or the UAE as soon as they secured a permanent job. There was muttering about preventing teachers from taking career breaks.
It might be more profitable to question what is driving the exodus. The housing crisis is probably the most important factor. Young and not-so-young people cannot see themselves getting mortgages in any of the major urban areas. Even finding an affordable place to rent is often impossible. In rural areas, there are other obstacles, including planning permission.
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There is another problem, possibly not as obvious as housing, but affecting far more people. Teachers do not feel valued as professionals.
It is most obvious in the case of senior-cycle reform. Junior-Cycle reform was widely acknowledged as having failed to take teachers’ expertise into account in the design of new courses. Schools were promised senior-cycle reform would be different.
Instead, yet again, teachers felt frustrated and unheard.
Science teachers pointed out again and again that the proposal to have individual coursework worth 40 per cent of the marks simply was not feasible in many schools. There were not enough labs, equipment or personnel to oversee such a mammoth undertaking and to do so safely.
English teachers managed to get last-minute agreement for an oral examination as part of the reformed Leaving Cert, something which is both educationally valuable in itself and also circumvents cheating using AI.
The introduction of the new English course has had to be delayed while the State Examinations Commission (SEC) figures out how to implement an oral exam for every Leaving Cert student.
The science subjects have not been delayed at all. The SEC’s valid concerns are heard. Teachers’ concerns are not.
Schools were promised comprehensive AI guidelines 73 weeks ago: nearly a year and a half. None have appeared. The prospect of someone prompting a chatbot to produce coursework is an obvious dilemma, but a more fundamental question has not been addressed.
What does education mean in an age of AI? That is what we need guidelines to address. Yes, AI is over-hyped and quite possibly over-valued. There are eerie echoes of the dot.com bust of the 1990s. But even if it is over-hyped, it is still changing everything.
Good old grumpy US author Neil Postman identified the central issue in the 1990s, when television, computers and a barely functioning internet were all we had to worry about.
We cannot foretell the future. Saying that our children will be left behind if we do not embrace AI is like telling everyone they needed to be a programmer – well-intentioned and fatally short-sighted
“Every technology, from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer, is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a programme, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.”
In his book, Technopoly, Postman looks at what technology gives us, but also, what it takes away.
If we look at AI, and its particular economic and political context, what do we see? An industry that is dominated by billionaire, often libertarian, tech bros. One of them, Sam Altman, reiterated in May that he believes “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
More mundanely, his company, OpenAI, recently launched a study mode in ChatGPT that has the modest aim of working ‘side-by-side with the broader education ecosystem to ensure AI benefits learners worldwide.’
All the quotes from students used at the launch focused on interaction with ChatGPT, not with teachers or other students. In OpenAI’s world, education means interacting with a machine.
Wisdom is needed to see beyond the AI gold rush. Remember when everyone was being urged to get a degree in coding? And now no one can get an entry-level job in it?
We cannot foretell the future. Saying that our children will be left behind if we do not embrace AI is like telling everyone they needed to be a programmer – well-intentioned and fatally short-sighted.
Paradoxically, the skills most needed to navigate an age of AI do not involve teaching people how to use AI, but as Postman said, the necessary skills are learning how to exercise scrutiny, critical thinking and control.
For education to be life-enhancing, you need to place human beings at the centre. Ms McEntee has announced a National Convention on Education. Everyone in society, especially parents and students, has a stake in education and a right to be heard, yet a national conversation on education will be pointless if we persist in not taking teachers seriously as professionals.
