If you’re a parent, an educator, or just someone who’s been to school, you’ve probably developed an opinion about generative AI in classrooms. You might fear the demise of the five-paragraph essay, the ever-increasing ease of cheating, or, worse, the end of critical thinking altogether.
But don’t worry: The anxiety surrounding large language models in schools is anything but unprecedented. In 1975, teachers fretted that handheld calculators would undermine students’ capacity to “handle basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic,” according to a report in The New York Times. Others, though, believed calculators could “free students to concentrate on basic principles.” Sound familiar?
More such tales of anxiety can be found in The Pessimists Archive, a website that chronicles the moral panics associated with a variety of technological marvels going back to the 1850s. At the turn of the last century, the worry was over books. “Children Read Too Much,” “Novel Reading Causes Suicide,” and “Too Many Books in Our Schools” were a few of the headlines.
The cyclical nature of these alarmist reactions “reveals the kind of cognitive biases and psychology” behind fears of change, says Louis Anslow, who heads up the archive. The rejection of new technologies often isn’t based on any particular damning evidence but instead simply taps into parental angst over the uncertainty of the world their kids have inherited.
These overblown reactions also might give tech too much credit and education systems too little. The idea that any one tool has the power to “revolutionize” education systems relies on the premise that these systems are fragile and susceptible to overhaul. In reality, says Anslow, educational institutions are “quite impervious to change,” and new tech ends up “tacked onto the old system.”