Pair this with the fact that the AI systems themselves don’t truly “understand” what they’re producing. So, not only are we short cutting the human thinking process, but we’re not getting it through the machine either. It’s pattern recognition and mimicry all the way down.
This is something that I think about a lot as the tides of education ebb and flow. I think education tends to overcorrect. Rote memorization is seen as bad because there was a time when that was the end goal, the only thing students really did. So we overcorrected and seemingly forgot the power of automatic knowledge. I think the same thing has happened with direct instruction (lecturing). If all a student ever does in school is sit in lecture, then their learning might be subpar. But there are simply some topics and ideas that simply are best taught through direct instruction. Anyway, thanks for a good writeup!
Not only that, but there is an element of oppression within education, trying to turn it into the depositing of either (in the past) knowledge or (more recently) skills into students' heads, all with the goal of indoctrinating them rather than teaching them to think for themselves.
Paulo Freire called this "the banking model" of education.
Plus, some of the pivoting between education fads allows publishers to sell a new round of curriculums -- which are usually the old curriculums rebranded for the new thing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lecture has its place, but overreliance on one method of teaching at the expense of other teaching strategies is going to limit your ability to inspire students and get them to begin to grasp their own potential.
I'm at least a little worried about the recent push by the Chamber of Commerce crowd for making education all about job training, rather than preparing students to participate in a democracy.
Beyond the brilliance of the ideas shared, I tip my hat to the writing. Poetry in prose! "A generation raised on external cognition may never develop the internal dialogue that characterises deep thought, the ability to hold multiple, contesting ideas in tension, to sense contradictions, to bear the weight of knowledge accumulated through struggle."
Agree. And to that I would add "...they were performing knowing without actually knowing. Ghostwriting their own ignorance." Precisely captures what is as stake.
Great post! This was my favourite line: “The paradox is that by memorising so much you can actually forget about the very thing that took up all your cognitive bandwidth.”!
"The loss is not just intellectual but spiritual: we risk becoming strangers to our own minds, fluent performers of intelligence we do not possess, successful at tasks that require no growth, no struggle, no transformation of the self."
What struck me most about this phrase is how it brings "spirituality" and "transformation" back into the heart of education—not as side notes, but as essential truths. It echoes Allan Bloom’s warning in The Closing of the American Mind: that without inner formation, education risks becoming hollow. And now, as the Science of Learning discourse circles around AI as the new public enemy, the question of how to respond remains wide open.
Consider that many of the tech CEOs don't allow their children to have phones and greatly restrict screen time. The elite wealthy know what's going on, and are ensuring their descendants stay ahead. The gap can become a chasm.
Thank you for this breakdown Carl. One of the concerns I have is that in many cases we are looking to introduce AI (mainly LLMs) into schooling without really understanding the impact on cognition. I was reading Oliver Caviglioli's thoughts on external memory fields (EMF) and reflecting that people seem to assume AI is a form of an EMF, but it isn't.
The other question I keep coming back to is one that I am still struggling to fully express. AI is not going away. It will change how we work and how we live. It's not impossible to imagine that within five years people will have access to wearable, personalized AI - maybe even something people come to see as a personal daemon. This sounds far-fetched, even terrifying, but it is not impossible to conceive. I cannot imagine that doesn't change in some ways the nature of what an education should be, and what we learn. I just hope we keep thinking and acting ahead, rather than tumbling through the slipstream.
Thank you for sharing these insightful reflections on memory and learning. From my own experience, I’ve observed that students who begin memorizing religious verses from the Holy Book and mastering mathematical tables, such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, from a young age often outperform their peers in class. They also tend to excel in their future academic studies at college and university.
(1) Whole language is the idea that language typically makes more sense within a relevant context, when you're doing something useful with it, or when you have a lot of background knowledge about it, and less sense when you break it into smaller and smaller pieces and divorce it from any other context. That hasn't been discredited.
(2) It's interesting that AI promoters have latched onto the term "neural network" to make it seem as if computers are doing the same thing brains are doing. I've been reading the book The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, and they delve a bit into the history of that term as it pertains to computers.
"Besides the lack of new ideas and discovery of new connections between two random thoughts, my third problem is with memory and recollection.
Humans do not store all their memories as a filing system; they reconstruct it as and when the need arises to internalize a process or problem statement. This is why Bob Dylan said we make up our past and every time we reconstruct a memory, we add new insights or narrative to it.
The greatest tragedy is our belief that we cannot change our past. We can, and our brain is reorganizing those experiences all the time (in my view).
When I recollected the Myanmar story of loss and love, I took a minute to send my brain to those moments where I was at the pagoda having a conversation on loss and family with the lady. The ability to jump back to Myanmar in a minute and come back within a few seconds back to my desk is a human phenomenon. AI does not have continual learning (as of now), which means it cannot go back to its entire history to reconstruct a memory.
This ability to go back to my childhood memories, my old long-lost friendships, relationships that broke my heart all bring this human element to my writing that pattern matching words cannot create.
And this leads me to what I've lost most profoundly in my AI-assisted writing"
Pair this with the fact that the AI systems themselves don’t truly “understand” what they’re producing. So, not only are we short cutting the human thinking process, but we’re not getting it through the machine either. It’s pattern recognition and mimicry all the way down.
This is something that I think about a lot as the tides of education ebb and flow. I think education tends to overcorrect. Rote memorization is seen as bad because there was a time when that was the end goal, the only thing students really did. So we overcorrected and seemingly forgot the power of automatic knowledge. I think the same thing has happened with direct instruction (lecturing). If all a student ever does in school is sit in lecture, then their learning might be subpar. But there are simply some topics and ideas that simply are best taught through direct instruction. Anyway, thanks for a good writeup!
Not only that, but there is an element of oppression within education, trying to turn it into the depositing of either (in the past) knowledge or (more recently) skills into students' heads, all with the goal of indoctrinating them rather than teaching them to think for themselves.
Paulo Freire called this "the banking model" of education.
Plus, some of the pivoting between education fads allows publishers to sell a new round of curriculums -- which are usually the old curriculums rebranded for the new thing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lecture has its place, but overreliance on one method of teaching at the expense of other teaching strategies is going to limit your ability to inspire students and get them to begin to grasp their own potential.
I'm at least a little worried about the recent push by the Chamber of Commerce crowd for making education all about job training, rather than preparing students to participate in a democracy.
Cheers, Carl! An excellent piece. Thank you.
Beyond the brilliance of the ideas shared, I tip my hat to the writing. Poetry in prose! "A generation raised on external cognition may never develop the internal dialogue that characterises deep thought, the ability to hold multiple, contesting ideas in tension, to sense contradictions, to bear the weight of knowledge accumulated through struggle."
Agree. And to that I would add "...they were performing knowing without actually knowing. Ghostwriting their own ignorance." Precisely captures what is as stake.
Great post! This was my favourite line: “The paradox is that by memorising so much you can actually forget about the very thing that took up all your cognitive bandwidth.”!
"The loss is not just intellectual but spiritual: we risk becoming strangers to our own minds, fluent performers of intelligence we do not possess, successful at tasks that require no growth, no struggle, no transformation of the self."
What struck me most about this phrase is how it brings "spirituality" and "transformation" back into the heart of education—not as side notes, but as essential truths. It echoes Allan Bloom’s warning in The Closing of the American Mind: that without inner formation, education risks becoming hollow. And now, as the Science of Learning discourse circles around AI as the new public enemy, the question of how to respond remains wide open.
Could it be that in ten years the reading gap between rich and poor kids will close with the rich kids falling back?
Consider that many of the tech CEOs don't allow their children to have phones and greatly restrict screen time. The elite wealthy know what's going on, and are ensuring their descendants stay ahead. The gap can become a chasm.
Thank you for this breakdown Carl. One of the concerns I have is that in many cases we are looking to introduce AI (mainly LLMs) into schooling without really understanding the impact on cognition. I was reading Oliver Caviglioli's thoughts on external memory fields (EMF) and reflecting that people seem to assume AI is a form of an EMF, but it isn't.
The other question I keep coming back to is one that I am still struggling to fully express. AI is not going away. It will change how we work and how we live. It's not impossible to imagine that within five years people will have access to wearable, personalized AI - maybe even something people come to see as a personal daemon. This sounds far-fetched, even terrifying, but it is not impossible to conceive. I cannot imagine that doesn't change in some ways the nature of what an education should be, and what we learn. I just hope we keep thinking and acting ahead, rather than tumbling through the slipstream.
Thank you for sharing these insightful reflections on memory and learning. From my own experience, I’ve observed that students who begin memorizing religious verses from the Holy Book and mastering mathematical tables, such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, from a young age often outperform their peers in class. They also tend to excel in their future academic studies at college and university.
(1) Whole language is the idea that language typically makes more sense within a relevant context, when you're doing something useful with it, or when you have a lot of background knowledge about it, and less sense when you break it into smaller and smaller pieces and divorce it from any other context. That hasn't been discredited.
(2) It's interesting that AI promoters have latched onto the term "neural network" to make it seem as if computers are doing the same thing brains are doing. I've been reading the book The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, and they delve a bit into the history of that term as it pertains to computers.
I wrote about this on my substack
"Besides the lack of new ideas and discovery of new connections between two random thoughts, my third problem is with memory and recollection.
Humans do not store all their memories as a filing system; they reconstruct it as and when the need arises to internalize a process or problem statement. This is why Bob Dylan said we make up our past and every time we reconstruct a memory, we add new insights or narrative to it.
The greatest tragedy is our belief that we cannot change our past. We can, and our brain is reorganizing those experiences all the time (in my view).
When I recollected the Myanmar story of loss and love, I took a minute to send my brain to those moments where I was at the pagoda having a conversation on loss and family with the lady. The ability to jump back to Myanmar in a minute and come back within a few seconds back to my desk is a human phenomenon. AI does not have continual learning (as of now), which means it cannot go back to its entire history to reconstruct a memory.
This ability to go back to my childhood memories, my old long-lost friendships, relationships that broke my heart all bring this human element to my writing that pattern matching words cannot create.
And this leads me to what I've lost most profoundly in my AI-assisted writing"
https://thirdfrontier.substack.com/p/my-writing-is-so-sloppy-now
Yes!
“We become not just dependent on external tools but vulnerable to their failures, unable to distinguish sense from nonsense.”
Sounds like what’s been happening of late.