The High Schools Going All-In on AI

0:07Ryan Knutson:A few months ago, my colleague Sam Schechner flew to Estonia in Northern Europe. He was there to visit high schools. A Spanish teacher let him sit in on the class. He had set up the class in the computer lab, and he introduced me to the class and said I'd be observing. The whole text that you have there, just copy-paste that into chat. And, you know, basically he showed them some sort of game-like activities that he'd created with ChatGPT for them to practice their Spanish. And then give ChatGPT the prompt that you have there. Yes, my dear, it's the same one. Yes.

0:55Ryan Knutson:Sam, how did you find yourself in a classroom in Estonia? Well, they are doing something that I thought was unusual, interesting, and a little bit scary. They are giving every high school student in the country, or at least to start with every 10th and 11th grader, their own chat GPT account. Why? Well, yeah, that's the funny part. They're doing it because they're worried about the impact that AI could have on learning. Estonia started thinking about the project in 2024 after one survey found that 90 % of the country's high school students were already using generative AI for learning. They figured that not doing anything was the worst choice of all.

1:41And so instead, they're launching a national experiment to figure out what the best thing is to do. And I wanted to figure out if there's a way to, I guess at a basic level, if there's a way to keep learning in an age when machines can do your thinking for you. You don't have to worry about the grammar. It's just the chat will tell you if you have made a mistake and you can correct it afterwards.

2:14Ryan Knutson:Why does what's happening in Estonia matter to people who are not living in Estonia? Estonia, right. It's a small country. It's, you know, bordering Russia. It's a different language. It feels pretty far away. But this is really the first big deployment in high schools of ChatGPT. the entire idea of school and how we encourage learning and what even we want people to learn is at stake here. And so it's a glimpse maybe of what could happen in a school district near you.

2:55Ryan Knutson:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Thursday, September 24th.

3:08Ryan Knutson:Coming up on the show, Inside Estonia's High School Experiment with AI.

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4:00Ryan Knutson:Estonia's decision to bring AI into classrooms is not the country's first rodeo with new technology. Estonia, since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in the 90s, was early to put the internet in classrooms. They had something called the Tiger Leap. Estonia's Tiger Leap foundations launched a program introducing IT science and computer programming at schools from the first grade. During the Tiger Leap, news shows in Estonia showed kids rushing toward computers. Its designers point out that internet and modern technologies have become an integral part of daily life. They're extremely proud of this.

4:37This is part of the country's kind of founding legacy. They see themselves as a digital country. And so when the AI revolution comes about, the natural instinct is, okay, we're going to have to grab this bull by the horns. This is what Estonia does.

4:53Ryan Knutson:So last year, Estonia decided to launch a new experiment. They're calling it the AI Leap. The country's partnered with OpenAI and recently with Google to give tens of thousands of high schoolers access to free chatbots. This is, yeah, a small gym we have. Not that small. Oh, yeah, yeah, but 4 ,000 students, yeah. One school that's part of AI Leap is located in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. During his visit, Sam met with the school principal. Indrek Lilamagi. He is the principal of Tallinn-Pelgulina State High School, or PIRG as it's known. If you would like to just see the school, maybe also. Yeah, sure, show me.

5:41It's a beautiful school. And, you know, Indrek himself uses AI tools. He tells me he does some vibe coding. And the school ethos that he set up is very human. And in fact, in the school, they don't oblige any student to use AI if they don't want to. AI Leap, the program has provided meaningful, high-quality materials, resources, workshops for teachers, school leaders. I think it's going well. I mean, I guess one argument would be that effectively you're saying, use AI, and that it encourages more than might otherwise. Yeah, but the thing is that they use it anyway. They already use it.

6:26Ryan Knutson:So, yeah, so I don't believe that AI Leap, like, pushes them to use it more. Students might already be using AI, but Indrek told Sam that he's worried about students using the tools on their own, and how it could affect their ability to learn.

6:46If you imagine that school is a gym for the brain and you go to the gym, it would be kind of pointless to ask your personal trainer to lift your weights for you, right? I mean, the personal trainer there is to tell you what weights to lift, in what order. But if you don't lift the weights, then obviously you're not going to get stronger.

7:04Ryan Knutson:Yeah, and your personal trainer just gets shredded. Yeah. Well, I mean, as we know, these AI tools are, you know, when it comes to answering questions, they are shredded, right? They could do the work. They can do your high school work for you. AI can take a whole bunch of texts and can synthesize them for you. And, you know, kind of reading something long and figuring out what's important and what it's connected to, that's thinking too. And those are important skills that you learn in school. and, you know, how much you want the machine to do that versus how much you want to do it yourself or you want your kids to do it in school is a really important question.

7:40Ryan Knutson:Back in the day, the way teachers got students to exercise their minds was by having them do stuff like answer questions or write essays. Teachers would then judge the output, the finished product, but the effort that the student put in to get that output was the point. That kind of learning changed with AI. AI basically breaks the connection between effort and output. AI now makes it so that the output, the performance, is not correlated anymore with the effort that you do. Right. And so you have to rethink your whole pedagogy because if the point is the effort, then the grade or the output kind of don't really matter anymore.

8:24Ryan Knutson:So how do you lean into AI when AI breaks the learning process? Estonia's solution, in part, was to come up with a version of AI that didn't just give you all the answers. They call it the Socratic chatbot. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, was known for not stating what he thought, but instead eliciting answers from his students by asking questions. That sort of is the coinage of the Socratic method. Under the AI leap, Estonia took the Socratic method and applied it to the school's version of ChatGPT. Effectively, it's a tool that won't answer your homework questions for you, but instead helps you scaffold a way to approach the answer, helps you plan what you're going to do to do the assignment.

9:16And they're going to try to figure out a way to use it in a way that promotes learning rather than undermines it.

9:22Ryan Knutson:So rather than being just an answer machine, which it is now for most users that want to use it, more of like a tutor almost. Exactly. This Socratic chatbot in some ways mirrors the philosophy that Indrek and Perg are espousing, which is much more of a process-based approach to learning than an outcome-based approach to learning.

9:47Ryan Knutson:It's not hard to imagine some version of the future where the Socratic chatbot does all the teaching, where each student has their own personal AI teacher. I want an aesthetically pleasing classroom, yes? But that is not what Indrik Lilamagi's school is pushing for. He actually wants his teachers to play a more active role. Guys, no gaps between the desks. Thank you. One teacher that Sam met at the school is Agne Kosk, The head languages teacher. I don't believe in AI as this thing that will personalize education because then it means that everybody's sitting in their own room somewhere and that it doesn't work.

10:23They need to talk more than ever.

10:25Ryan Knutson:Sam watched as Agne tried to get students in an intermediate English class to use a Socratic chatbot during an exercise. Are we going to use school AI? Yes, so this is something that I do recommend. Use your school account. Agne Koskowitz. looking at trying to get the students to at once practice their English by chatting with a chatbot, but to do it, you know, doing something that actually would be of interest to them, which is researching possible study abroad programs in English. We will try to then use AI to give us advice. We will see whether this advice is useful. And those of you who already know what you want to do, you can see whether the advice sort of lines up with what you have chosen for yourself.

11:13Now, how would you do that? How would you prompt it to do that? And they talked about prompting for a while. So if I say, please get, I don't know, career, further studies, advice from AI, how would you do this? So come up with a plan. And then she shared her prompt of how she was going to do it. How did I make this prompt? This is an important point to sort of remember. Of course I asked JGPT to make the prompt. I gave it a little bit of information. So I have this high school class. I gave it sort of the task that we're going to do at the end.

11:47Ryan Knutson:Sam looked over one student's shoulder as she tried out the prompt. By the way, kids in Estonia refer to the chatbot as he. So what have you asked it here? Here? I just based it here. Yeah. And then he just started to ask these questions. about the future. And here I started to just... Say what you... Yes, what I want. Pilot, flight attendant, sports coach? Yes. Those are your... Yes. At the end of the assignment, Agne asked her students to think beyond the answers that the chatbot gave them, to take the next step and think for themselves. You do your research yourself now. Don't rely on chat GPT.

12:28It might have, like, outdated information at some point. It might be wrong about something. So please check the school website to make sure it's there.

12:38Ryan Knutson:What was obvious to Sam was that Estonian educators have put a lot of thought and care into how they bring AI into the classroom. And the students? Surely they're loving an education-oriented tool designed by grown-ups, right? I'm curious, how do you use AI? Not really. You don't? Not really. No? What the students think of AI Leap? is next.

13:44Thank you.

14:20Ryan Knutson:So let's talk about the students. How are the students in Astoria feeling about this experiment? Well, you know, they actually did a survey of students, and, you know, I talked to a bunch as well. And one of the first and biggest reactions they have to the Socratic chatbot is that it is super annoying. The complaints start with basic things. In Agne Kosk's English class, for example, the chatbot kept switching between Estonian and English. It said that I will talk to you in Estonian to support you better. Even though the prompt said, please use B2 English. It's so smart. It thinks you're trying to do a translation.

15:01Yes, yes. Kids started to see that it would switch back into Estonian, and they had to kind of repeatedly tell the chatbot, no, this is an English class. My teacher says we should be talking in English. Please stay in English.

15:13Ryan Knutson:But the bigger nuisance was the Socratic element of the chatbot, where it asks more questions instead of just giving the answer. I spoke to some kids who were basically like, I'm so over it. I get it. You know, AI is going to make my brain rot. but like, it can't, you know, can I please stop asking me questions? Like, Anna, what did it tell you when you wanted to make porridge? Yes, I asked him that, oh, how I can make this porridge? And the answer that he gave, what experience do you have with porridge? And I haven't used it after. Yeah. I used the normal judgment, you know, the studying judgment.

15:55Even for school?

15:56Ryan Knutson:Yes. Yeah.

16:02Ryan Knutson:Another student uses chatbots sometimes, but actually avoids AI when it's a subject he really cares about. Mathematics and stuff. AI, a lot of times, wrong. Yeah. Very wrong. So in a way, you're deciding what you think is where you want to practice and where you want to get strong at. When I feel I'm strong or something, I use AI. when I feel like I'm weak or something. I basically love it myself. Yeah, that makes sense. And then there are the kids who don't want to use AI at all. Did you find AI useful? I really didn't. I think it was a waste of my time. I don't use it because I don't. I'm afraid I'll just become lazy.

16:47It's easy to think that you don't need to do the job, but then who does the job for you and for what cost? There were some students I spoke with who don't want to use AI tools because they are concerned about the environmental impact of data centers and, you know, water consumption, energy consumption. I just find it really wasteful, like, in the terms of water, of course. We were told in, like, third grade that we already don't have much drinking water on Earth. And now they use it to cool down the servers. That's like, it's terrible.

17:25Ryan Knutson:At the end of last school year, about 65 % of Estonian students with access to the school's Socratic version of Chachi-PT had activated their account. But only a minority of students use it regularly. This year, Estonia is opening up the AI assistant to 12th graders and vocational school students too.

17:47Ryan Knutson:At the school in Tallinn, Sam spoke to the student body president. a 12th grader named Cordelia Violet Papp. She is really adamantly opposed to AI. I'm really, really strongly against it overall, just specifically the language models and generative AI. She just thinks it's new, it's not studied yet, and she thinks that there's so much that could go wrong with it. You know, teachers don't necessarily know how to use it effectively, she said, and students don't know anything either, she said. Cordelia also said that all the thought and care that went into the school's Socratic chatbot doesn't really fix the bigger problems with AI and learning.

18:30Just the fact that we have been given this does not stop students from using normal chat GPT and just getting the answer anyway, which is what they are going to do because it's easy and humans naturally want to do things that are easy. You know, school is already seen as something that's just mostly meaningless and too hard and too difficult, then why do we have to do all this stuff, basically? So if such a thing is given to us that, like, makes us able to shortcut through all of this annoying bad stuff that no one wants to do, I mean, the students specifically, then people are going to use it.

19:05Cordelia has since graduated, but she told Sam that earlier this year

19:09Ryan Knutson:she stood up in front of the school at a talent show and read a poem she wrote about AI. Let me see. Maybe this then. This is a bit interesting because it uses words in Estonian that have been created recently. You know, one of the paragraphs that she read to me in Estonian, she said, was, you know, about all of the new vocabulary that AI was kind of unleashing on all of us. I don't even know how to translate them, but maybe it's just interesting to hear for you.

19:48Ryan Knutson:The poem is about Estonian words themselves. So Cordelia says the English translation sort of misses the point. But here it is. She writes, Like, why must there be a term for water bankruptcy? And digital trash? Smart scive? AI blunder? Brain rot? But these are so ugly. And for what? We don't need a way to express yet another woe.

20:20So maybe that's something.