In the Age of AI, Knowledge Matters More, Not Less

Randi Weingarten vs. Randi Weingarten

In her recent speech on artificial intelligence and education, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten offered a series of recommendations for schools. Two of them stood out to me:

3. Redesign schooling so active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning, is the norm across all grade levels. That means redesigning accountability as well.

4. Ensure students have a solid foundation in literacy, numeracy and civic engagement.

These ideas may sound complementary, but they’re actually in tension with one another. And in the age of AI, schools should prioritize the latter.

For decades, progressive education reformers like Weingarten have argued that schools spend too much time on facts and “rote” memorization and not enough on projects, experiences, and real-world applications. The theory was that, as information became cheap and widely available, students didn’t need to memorize things anymore because they could always look them up.

Photo by sarah b on Unsplash

Artificial intelligence has taken that logic even further. Students can now ask a chatbot to explain a concept, summarize a book, or draft an essay in seconds.

But that’s precisely why foundational knowledge has become more important, not less.

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat sat in on AFT’s AI teacher training, and it suffers from this same disconnect. Here’s the key excerpt from his piece for Chalkbeat:

I sat in on this training, and many teachers I spoke with said they appreciated its message and strategies. But one important idea was largely missing: that critical thinking is directly connected to the content in math, history, and science classes. This is an essential reality often absent from discussions about how schools should respond to the spread of generative AI.

Indeed, the common refrain that teachers should focus on abstract critical thinking skills, disconnected from content, risks de-emphasizing the very thing — fluency with a broad set of facts — that supports critical thinking.

“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”

Project-based learning can be valuable when students already possess a strong foundation of knowledge and skills. Too often, however, schools treat projects as a substitute for content rather than an opportunity to apply content. The result in some cases is that students spend lots of time doing activities without really learning very much.

The students who will benefit most from AI won’t be the ones who know the least. It will be the ones who know enough to ask good questions, evaluate the answers, and then proceed to build on what they learn.

Reading List

Brian Bannon: America is facing a book-reading crisis

Doug Lemov: How schools can “re-center” the book

Andrew Rotherham: Can AI bring objectivity to Project-Based Learning?

Sara Mead:

Early childhood is at an inflection point