Is AI making us dumber?

Is AI making us dumber?

When I returned to the classroom for a one off last spring semester I was told by a newly retired professor that I could no longer require written assignments. Why I asked. He said “Because they never do their own work. It’s all AI.” Previously, I had required a news report critique due every other week in which the student analyzed a current event that we discussed in class and critically reviewed it. Students were also required to submit a term paper that counted for one fifth of the final grade on a subject that I approved. I encouraged them to find an issue, analyze it and then make a critical recommendation. I also encouraged them to prepare an outline and let me comment on it as well. That this exercise had value was confirmed one day when at lunch a person came up to me and said that he had been in my class ten ears before and the written reports were proving to be the one of the most valuable tool he acquired in his four years in college. He also said how he hated doing them at the time and regretted all the bad things he said about me on the teacher evaluations.

Fast forward to today. I tested using short answers, problems and essays. One student said that this was the first class in four years that was not multiple choice/true false. Most students complained and wanted to take the tests on their computers rather than write out the answers. When I got back the first exam I was shocked. All 53 were printed! No cursive at all. The one problem could be solved my computing 5% of $10,000. Fully one half of the class missed the problem. That ended my having them do computations. They were simply incapable of doing simple math. 

Don’t get me wrong. There were seven students in the class (of 53) who were very smart, who could do basic math but still could only print. I used to say that there were three types of people in the world, the 3 percent who make things happen, the 7 percent who know whats happening and the 90 percent who don’t have a clue what’s happening. I thought that the advent of readily available information at zero cost would change those percentages and there would be more in the know what’s happening category and less in the haven’t a clue category. Now I am not so sure. My casual observation is that those percentages may be the natural order of things, except that AI has made the 90 percent less capable and maybe dumber than previous generations.

Also I noted that not a single student was taking notes by hand. All were plinking away on their computers. In my case, taking notes by hand actually helped me remember and made learning easier. I wondered if this was just me or just my imagination. But lo and behold, in an article in the Wall Street Journal by Allysia Finley, “AI’s biggest threat: Young people who can’t think” the author state, “Growing research shows that handwriting engages parts of your brain that play a crucial role in learning and helps children with word and letter recognition. Taking notes by hand also promotes memory development by forcing you to synthesize and prioritize information. When you plunk away on a keyboard, on the other hand, information can go, as it were, in one ear and out the other. A study last year analyzed brain electrical activity of university students during the activities of handwriting and typing. Those who were handwriting showed higher levels of neural activation across more brain regions: “Whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity,” the researchers noted.”

What about printing instead of cursive? Frank Glassner in his blog, Compensation in Context tells us in “Dumb and Dumber: How America Graduated with Honors in the Death of Excellence (and became a Nation of Participation Trophies, Scrantons and Unparallel Parking) says “Cursive was more than pretty loops. It taught rhythm, form, and thoughtfulness. Each letter demanded patience. It was tactile, artistic, and dare we say—human. But we traded all that for a keyboard and autocorrect. And what do we lose when handwriting dies? Memory. Cognition. Creativity. Studies show that writing by hand strengthens brain development, improves focus, and helps encode knowledge. Typing is efficient. Writing is personal. One produces output. The other produces understanding.”

Another casualty from my old course was the reading list in the library. I don’t know if today’s students even know where the library is on campus. But no reading of real books. Instead they were given links to readings on the class internet site. It turned out that I could see who was accessing the site and who didn’t. Some did not look at it at all, most rarely and only a few read it daily,

It is no secret that by any metric our kids today are dumber. Test scores are falling so the education industrial complex simply eliminates the standards for grading in the name of “equity.” But that doesn’t help the kids learn and lowers the bar for all kids. Reading proficiency continues to fall resulting in a generation of kids who don’t read. Ask a young person what was the last novel that they read. You may hear the response “What’s a novel?” In the days of reading lists, students had to read real books. Now they seldom read a book in school and read books even less out of school. In 1984, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun almost every day.  In 2023, that figure was 14 percent with 31 saying that they never read for fun at all. 

So if not learning to read, write or critically think what are they being taught? Its global warming, gender diversity, critical race theory, racial/gender identity, socialism, anti-capitalism, America is evil, America is racist, white fragility, gender neutral words like “hxrstories” and “cisheteropatriarchy”, DEI and other items of critical pedagogy. 

Does all this necessarily mean that we as a nation are in trouble because the education industrial complex has given us a generation of kids who cannot write, don’t read and cannot think? That college students are like this should be alarming. Glassner reports that employers are finding that their new hires lack critical thinking skills, can’t write and cannot perform basic tasks that previous hires could do. Now the employers have to train new hires in remedial skills. If AI is cheaper and more efficient than hiring college graduates then the question is whether AI will replace this generation in the workplace. 

Lastly, my conclusion is that the ratios of those that make things happen, those who know what’s happening and those who haven’t a clue as to what’s happening won’t change. The only change is that they all, in particular the last group will be dumber than their predecessors. I am reminded of a joke in which a person was told that he was D-U-M-B. He said “dum bah?”