The recent explosion of AI throughout our lives, and especially in our education systems, has raised new concerns for parents and educators. As AI does more of our thinking for us, what exactly do we need higher education for? We already have, or soon will have, the ability to outsource much of our intellectual work to AI, and our machines will achieve far better results than we can on our own. In this new world, how will my kid learn to think, or even learn to care about thinking critically?
What seemed like science fiction only a short time ago has become real, and its capabilities are growing exponentially. Students, parents, and educators alike must agree on the limits of AI use in education, at every level. We can perhaps agree that AI's ability to synthesize information for us can improve our efficiency, freeing up time to think about new and helpful uses for the technology. But it is equally clear that we rightly fear losing something essential about our humanness: our ability to think.
How do we convey that value to students growing up in an AI-dominated world?
Perhaps the question should be inverted. Isn't it truer to say that we need people who can think critically now more than ever? We must be able to evaluate how this powerful new technology is being used, what impact it is having on our society and our planet, and whether the results it generates reflect bias or distort the facts.
Unless we are prepared to let AI run our entire society, we need human beings who can critically evaluate what AI is and isn't doing well, and who can distinguish legitimate uses from illegitimate ones. Critical thinking skills are exactly what we need now, more urgently than ever.
How do we build them? That's the pedagogical question I take up in my book, Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success. In every discipline, students can be taught modes of thinking and analysis that are transferable across contexts. The real purpose of college, and so the best use of a college education, is to develop those skills. They are the key to academic success in the classroom, and they will prepare students for any job the future holds.
One of the most valuable skills college can teach is metacognition: inviting students to observe the process of their own thinking, and especially their own learning. Successful students aren't simply learning more things; they're learning to think more effectively, to analyze information, and to determine which questions call for further research. They're always engaging with what they're learning, interrogating it, working out what matters, and why.
These are exactly the skills we need to evaluate and manage AI as it grows more pervasive and more powerful. AI can only be developed and used ethically if there are people trained, and committed, to asking these questions. Colleges can and should play a major role in shaping people who bring critical thinking skills to bear on the full range of issues we face, individually and collectively, in the twenty-first century (AI being only the most prominent example today).
The need for critical thinking is only growing and meeting it will take a real commitment from parents and educators alike: to teach students that learning to think critically is the most important goal of their college years, and that the skills they build there will serve them for the rest of their lives. It is also a central aspect of their humanness.