AI in Education: Professionals or Machine Operators?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why educators must stay professionals and craftspeople as AI and technology reshape teaching.
Key Takeaways
- Education Has Artisan Roots - Teaching is fundamentally a craft that depends on skill, judgment, and continual refinement.
- Industrialization Creates a Choice - Schools can either reduce educators to labor and machine operation or strengthen teaching as a true profession.
- AI Can Augment or Replace - Technology can support great teaching, but it becomes dangerous when educators are treated as babysitters for apps.
- Edtech Incentives Matter - Companies that sell machines often benefit from minimizing labor, so school leaders must protect the professional role of educators.
- Medicine Offers a Model - Like healthcare, education can embrace advanced technology while keeping trained professionals firmly in charge.
Full Transcript
Education has artisan roots, and we have this identity at our core as craftspeople, people who have a craft that needs to be refined, that needs to be practiced, and that needs to be central to our identity. But industrialization pushes us down one of two paths,
and I think we haven't fully resolved which path we're going to go down. One path is becoming merely industrialized. Right? If you're an artisan, if you're a craftsperson, and industrialization swoops in, well, industrialization doesn't really need craftspeople. It needs machine operators.
It needs labor. And labor is just an expense under industrialization. The other path that we can go down, and we've been working on this for a long time, but I think we're not fully there, is the path of professionalism. Right? We need to be a profession, even as industrialization advances. We have AI now.
We have all these tools. That can augment our work, but if we're not careful, they can replace our work or they can reduce us to merely machine operators. And we see this operating all the time. We see this dynamic happening everywhere, right? If it is our job to merely operate the machines, to merely push the buttons, to merely manage the slop that apps put out, right?
If we are simply babysitters while students work on computers, while students...
learn from AI apps that are putting out slop for them, then I think the wrong path will have been realized, right? We'll complete that transition from craftspeople, from artisans, from people who have skills, from people who have art to their work, We'll have completed that transition down into mere labor.
And, of course, the incentive for the people who sell the machines is to minimize labor, right? Labor is just an expense. We don't need labor. We don't want labor.
So, let's get the educators out of here as quickly as possible, in this way of thinking, because they're merely an expense, and that cuts into our profits. I think, as educators, we have to resist this not by saying, no, actually, we're labor, and you should pay us more for that labor.
Like, if that labor is not valuable, it's not valuable. And if we accept that paradigm that that's all we are is labor, this is not gonna go the way that it needs to to maximize student learning. And I think a good place to look for an example of how to manage this well is medicine, right?
Medicine benefits a great deal from technology, probably more than any other field.
And yet, no one is saying that now healthcare professionals are not professionals. No one is saying, well, doctors are just button-pushing monkeys. Right? No, that has not happened in the healthcare field because we know we need professionals to lead this field. And we need to hold on to those artisan roots while benefiting from the advances in technology and remaining in charge as professionals. So, that is what I see as the path before us in education.
Let me know what you think.