Artificial Intelligence Eating Your Homework!
September 2025
I saw how infotech and AI are challenging our schooling system on my parents’ night visit to my newly-minted 9th grader daughters’ high school. I followed their schedules, spending a few minutes in each class where teachers described curricula, grading, and various practices. The pros will truly outweigh the cons when there’s an education revolution as transformative as the infotech and AI.
On the techno “pro” side, each student is assigned a Chromebook. Teachers might post assignments there or curated readings or learning materials, e.g., Kahn Academy videos. Google can be used for certain assignments. There might be online tests that register answers that are automatically submitted to the teachers. Websites not relevant to the school’s efforts are blocked.
On the techno “con” side, several teachers complained about students using Chat-GPT to do homework—students caught using it get a zero for the assignment—but they said that for now, they can spot awkward AI-speak. One teacher requires students to write assignments by hand, which cuts down on cut-and-paste homework cheating. An English teacher requires essays to be written in class where he reviews and make suggestions for each draft. The Spanish teacher does not assign homework since kids would use online tools to complete assignments rather than actually learning Español.
But it’s not just specific classes that need to adjust to infotech and AI. The entire schooling system needs to transform for our exponential techno-future.
Our current century-old system is based on the assembly line model, with one-size-fits-all, sage-one-a-stage curricula and standardized tests that was meant to give the average student just enough schooling to work on manufacturing assembly lines. Yes, most school today have tweaked systems with honors classes and the like.
But children are unique individuals and their ways of learning vary. One antithesis for the current system was also originated a century ago by Maria Montessori. Google’s AI tells us that her approach “emphasizes hands-on learning, self-directed exploration, and independence within a thoughtfully prepared environment. Children make choices in their learning activities, which are guided by teachers who act as observers and facilitators rather than lecturers. This whole-child approach fosters cognitive, physical, social-emotional, and linguistic development, nurturing intrinsic motivation, self-discipline, and a love of lifelong learning by providing a nurturing, respectful environment.”
It's no accident that Montessori students include Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, and Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. In the book Rewiring Education: How Technology Can Unlock Every Student's Potential, author John Couch, Apple employee #54 and its former education VP, with Jason Towne explain how individualized education needs to supersede the current antiquated schooling system to integrate and utilize future tech in educating “digital natives” for our techno-future.
So let’s juice the education revolution to ensure that future!Add text here!