Summary
School should be a gym for the brain, where students practice hard skills to grow, not a job focused on delivering products or gaming grades. AI can tempt shortcuts, so schools must teach how learning works and use AI as a tool for creative practice and study. A true cognitive gym supports effort, belonging, and meaningful chances to show real learning.
Highlights
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When it comes to AI in education, the argument goes, we should think of school as a “cognitive gym,” a place where we exert our brains in order to strengthen them. Using AI to do cognitive work for us deprives our brains of the opportunity to exercise.
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metrics are not suitable for everything. The more dynamic and variable something is, the more resistant it is to assessment by metrics. Learning is a good example, yet we try to quantify learning in any number of ways. The example Nguyen offers is grades, which have become our metrics for learning. Over time, however, grades have become a classic example of Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.