By Amber Strong Makaiau

This edition of the progressive philosophy and pedagogy blog is being published as Hanahau‘oli School thoughtfully and deliberately engages in the process of finding meaningful and responsible ways to integrate AI into the school culture.

In 1937, Louisa Palmer wrote to the Hanahau‘oli School community:

Progressive education..is a moving, dynamic, changing education – not a theory or a system proved and therefore static, but a living thing, growing, continuously having to change because of the three great changing elements with which we deal – children, environment and civilization or culture. This should not indicate instability or following fads, nor change of fundamental principles. But it does indicate a readiness to accept a new viewpoint when the need for it arises; it does indicate watching life and children alertly – not passively as so much former education has done (Palmer, 1937).

Palmer served as Head of School at Hanahau‘oli from 1924 to 1957. This was a time period filled with change, including a number of major technological innovations that ultimately altered the status quo for a large portion of humanity. Noteworthy inventions of the era include: the airplane (1903), rocketry (1926), television (1927), computers (1937), nuclear power (1942), and spaceflight (1957). There is no doubt that Palmer was “alert” to the dramatic ways in which these new technologies were shifting the lived experiences of individuals and society, and more importantly was working with faculty and staff to develop the “new viewpoints” and practices needed for teaching students who were coming of age within this shifting paradigm. Central to the progressive education mission: Palmer also knew that they would need to “readjust” (Dewey & Dewey, 1915/2003, p. 246) their progressive education model to address the changing ways humans were thinking about and using emergent technologies to navigate, enhance, and achieve the full potential of their lives.

Much like Palmer, progressive educators today find themselves living, learning, and teaching in another era of profound technological growth. At the top of the list, questions about the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be the most prevalent and pressing. Everywhere I look, there is endless commentary regarding the possible role of AI in schools. “From fears of the end of education as we know it, to adopting policies to quickly supplant or ban it, to finding easy ways to lesson plan” (Human Restoration Project, 2023, p. 4). Additionally, a growing number of AI related professional development opportunities are also being offered to teachers. This makes sense considering sixty percent of educators report that they already use AI in their classrooms and “ninety-eight percent…identified a need for at least some education on ethical AI usage” (Hamilton, 2024). All of this has got me thinking: What might be a progressive educator's stance on the place of AI in 21st century progressive schools?

To explore this question I looked to the past and reacquainted myself with some of the most “fundamental principles” (as Palmer 1937 would put it) of progressive philosophy and pedagogy that might ground progressive educators as they make decisions about the role of generative AI in modern schools. I also put my ear to the ground, searching for the voices of philosophers and technologists who could speak to both the ethical and practical considerations of incorporating generative AI into students' educational experiences. This is how I found Reid Hoffman and the conversation he had with Krista Tippet in the podcast: AI, and What It Means to Be (More) Human (transcribed by Amy Chatelaine).

Unlike Hoffman, known by some as the “the philosopher of Silicon Valley” (Chatelaine, 2023), I am not an expert on technology. However, I am curious how the spirit of discovery and improvement that is central to a progressive philosophy and pedagogy might contribute to the current discourse about generative AI in teaching and learning. In the blog to follow, I document some of my reflections on their conversation–thoughts on the possible intersections between generative AI and progressive education:

I explore why careful attention to the various ways in which today’s technological innovations are altering the human condition, for better or for worse, must be a critical contemporary progressive education practice. This includes highlighting the progressive education tradition’s commitment to questioning what constitutes human intelligence and learning in the face of new technologies.
I examine the history of the movement, how progressive educators have been consistently dedicated to providing students with the opportunity to explore and work with technology as an integrated part of their schooling experience.
To that end, I emphasize the ethical stance that progressive educators have taken in working with students to recognize the active role we can all play in shaping how our relationship with technology can be used to create a better future society.
I wonder how we might focus on the art of question asking in modern schools, teaching students how to scrutinize and maximize the personal and social implications of generative AI in day-to-day living. I ask: Will progressive educators be at the forefront of experimenting with discovering responsible and effective ways for incorporating generative AI in today’s schools?

Embedded within what Palmer (1937) referred to as our moving, dynamic and changing approach to education–the progressive education movement was born out of the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914) and the many ways the new technologies of that era inspired progressive philosophers and practitioners to reimagine the purpose of schools. Join me in thinking about the unique ways the ongoing legacy of this movement can shed light on our current moment in the human journey and remind us of the powerful role schools can play in ensuring that human agency is central to our unfolding relationship with the new technologies we create.

Insights About Intelligence and Learning

So what exactly is Artificial intelligence or intelligence for that matter?

Artificial intelligence allows machines to execute tasks that have traditionally required human cognition. AI-powered programs and devices can make decisions, solve problems, understand and mimic natural language and learn from unstructured data. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT—a natural language processing chatbot—in the fall of 2022 brought AI to many people’s attention for the first time. However, AI tools have been part of the tech landscape for years (Hamilton, 2024).

The more I learn about generative AI, especially society’s response to the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the more connections I see with the progressive education movement’s interest in continually questioning what we mean by intelligence and learning in the context of schooling.

In the standard paradigm of educational practice, schools typically measure intelligence and learning by testing what students know (e.g. names, dates, definitions and ideas) or are able to do at a select point in time, including students’ ability to “comprehend how the teacher [or someone else for that matter] has integrated or applied the ideas” (Windschitl, 2006, p. 352) rather than having students construct knowledge themselves. While some schools today still take this approach–in response to the technological, economic, and social impacts of the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914), especially the changes that were occurring in how people lived and worked–early progressive educators questioned this standard paradigm of educational practice. Leaders of the movement like John Dewey called on schools to challenge “traditional” (Dewey, 1938) notions of human intelligence and learning in light of their rapidly changing world, and educators went to work translating this new philosophy of education from theory to practice.

Well documented in John and Evelyn Dewey’s (1915/2003) progressive education must read, Schools of Tomorrow, examples from cutting edge early 20th century progressive schools across the USA were used to illustrate why rote memorization, “knowledge that consists of the ready-made material which others have found out” (p. 238), and passive learning were outdated and ineffective measures of student intelligence. With real world case studies, they offered readers an approach to schooling that embraced a more progressive, holistic, and whole-child definition of intelligence. Here are some of the highlights from the book:

They defined intelligence and learning in a progressive education setting by a student's ability “to find out how to make knowledge when it is needed.” They stated, “[this] is the true end of the acquisition of information in school, not the information itself” (p.16).
They emphasized the need for schools to teach social intelligence, a critical area of development for learning how to live in a democracy. They shared, “responsibility for the conduct of society and government rests on every member of society. Therefore, every one must receive training that will enable him to meet this responsibility, giving him just ideas of the condition and needs of the people collectively, and developing those qualities which will insure his doing a fair share of the work [in our democracy]” (p. 304). Big takeaway–an individual’s intelligence must be measured by taking into account their ability to cooperate and work with others.
They asserted the idea that intelligence is developed through learning that engages our “bodies.” They explained, “it is the pioneer in education who realizes the extent to which young children learn through the use of their bodies, and the impossibility of insuring general intelligence through a system which does not use the body to teach the mind and the mind to teach the body.” They concluded: the body is an important “instrument for training powers of judgment and thinking. That is to say the pupils [must be] learning by doing” (p. 291 - 292).
They make extended references to the idea that intelligence and learning both have ethical and moral qualities, which can only be measured by a students’ ability to actively carry out tasks and solve problems in real world settings. They state, “the moral advantages of an active form of education reinforce its intellectual benefits…substitution of practical activities for the usual isolated text-book study achieves positive moral results” (p. 292-296).
Finally, they explained why grades can not adequately measure true intelligence and learning. Instead, they come to the conclusion that what one can accomplish via active engagement in both intellectual and practical tasks is a better measure of achievement. “Activity calls for the positive virtues–energy, initiative, and originality–qualities that are worth more to the world than even the most perfect faithfulness in carrying out orders. The pupil sees value of his work and so sees his own progress, which spurs him on to further results…artificial inducements to work are no longer necessary, and the child learns to work from the love of work itself, not for a reward or because he is afraid of punishment” (p. 298).

The Deweys recognized that these were major changes to the ways traditional schools defined intelligence and learning. They explained, “we must remember that we are dealing with a problem of readjustment, not original creation. It will take a long time to complete the readjustment which will be brought about gradually. The main thing now is to get started, and to start in the right direction…we must also remember that the essential thing to be brought about through the change is not amassing more information, but the formation of certain attitudes and interests, ways of looking at things and dealing with them..what is wanted is that pupils shall form the habit of connecting the limited information they acquire with the activities of life, and gain ability to connect a limited sphere of human activity with the scientific principles upon which its successful conduct depends” (pp. 246 - 247).

Now, over 100 years later, as we enter a possible “Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and biotechnology are changing our concepts of both life and consciousness” (Niiler, 2023) it is imperative that progressive educators continue to scrutinize and possibly readjust what counts as learning and intelligence in the context of modern schooling. This might start with a careful look at why generative AI is characterized as intelligent and a closer look at how AI learns. For example, Hoffman shares in the podcast that the “amazingly generative capabilities that now enable computers to learn…[are due to the fact that] what they learn is what they learn from the learning process” (Chatelaine, 2023). This focus on the process of learning is fundamental to a progressive philosophy and pedagogy.

For the most part, progressive educators focus on teaching students how to learn. They teach students (much like humans are programming AI to do) how to reflect on experience to improve the learning process. They also design educational experiences that require students to apply what they know about learning to help them think and act in novel learning contexts (Dewey, 1938). Imagine what humans might be capable of if more schools focused on teaching students these tenets of progressive education that are synonymous with AI learning? What if educators asked students to study how generative AI learns, and apply what they observe to improve their own learning process? What if educators taught students how to pay attention to the various aspects of their intelligence and learning (e.g. emotional, sensational, empathetic, embedded in a relationship with the natural world, and embodied cognition) that emergent AI can not yet accomplish? Only when they discover for themselves what distinguishes human learning from machine learning can they develop meaningful strategies for learning how to learn alongside emergent AI in positive and productive ways.

Another insight about learning and intelligence that contemporary generative AI models reveal, is the power of interdisciplinary connections. In her interview with Hoffman, Tippet shares: “one of [the] things I came to understand is that, whereas human intelligence and knowledge is [often] siloed to the extent that any given person or any given discipline has certain special knowledge…[generative AI] has access not just to the full sweep of all kinds of human knowledge, but it takes them out of the silos and can see them together” (Chatelaine, 2023). Since its founding, the progressive education movement has aimed to do just this, de-silo students’ educational experiences.

The progressive educator Alfie Kohn (2015) shares, “facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions—rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is typically interdisciplinary” (p.3). In the future, it is expected that this type of interdisciplinary and integrated teaching and learning that progressive educators are most fond of will remain relevant, but as generative AI grows its ability to harness the “vast repositories of knowledge…[using] the scale of the internet and of computing” it will become more and more important that humans learn how to recognize unsiloed connections in their lives beyond what AI can find on the internet. In other words, learners must become experts in making the types of nuanced connections that are uniquely human (e.g. between AI, the natural world, one another, and our inner lives). This example, comparing human and AI capabilities for making chocolate chip cookies, drives the point home. And from a progressive educators’ stance, schools will need to play an essential role in teaching students to identify and recognize what parts of their intelligence and learning process are uniquely human.

This brings me to some final insights in regards to what educators can gain by studying how generative AI learns. Hoffman reports that ChatGPT (and other large language learning models) are “improved by a pattern of human reinforcement feedback [which can help the AI] system [to] start adjusting” (Chatelaine, 2023). He shares this to underscore the importance of teaching human agency so that students can take an active role in teaching generative AI what it should and should not pay attention to on the internet. This collaborative model of teaching and learning, in which both teachers and students have agency in the process, is a hallmark of progressive education tradition. Aligned to Paulo Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy–the growing prevalence of generative AI will demand that more and more teachers dispose of the “banking” model of education (Freire, 1970) and adopt more progressive practices like active, real world, constructivist opportunities for students to apply their intelligence to make generative AI work for them. Additionally, human agency–defined as intentionality, forethought, self-reflectiveness, and self-reactiveness (Bandura, 2006)--in relationship with the technology we create, will become a necessary learner outcome.

Just as the Deweys called on educators to rethink what we mean by intelligence and learning over 100 years ago in Schools of Tomorrow, the technological advancements of today are pushing us to do the same. In the face of the emerging powers of generative AI, more and more educators are recognizing why the acquisition of information and a focus on end products (rather than what was gained during the learning process itself) cannot be the only measure of what we “know” and have learned. Hopefully, this new awareness will alleviate some of those educators' concerns about AI’s impact on student plagiarism, “reduced human interaction in learning,” “automation of tasks,” and “job displacement for teachers” (Hamilton, 2024). For example, if teachers shift their thinking and place more value on students actively demonstrating what they are capable of (writing, problem-solving, discussing, etc.), collaborating with their peers, or integrating constructive feedback from their teachers to accomplish novel tasks, it seems like these anxieties about generative AI become less relevant.

From the stance of a progressive educator, all of these shifts are promising. They illuminate how the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be a catalyst for productive change, introducing more educators and schools to the power and potential of a progressive education in teaching humans how to use technology in their search for the good life. As the Deweys (2003/1915) summarized, “the ideal is not to use schools as tools of existing industrial systems, but to use industry for the reorganization of schools” (p. 311). This includes the evolution of human intelligence.

Homo Techne

…one of the things I’ve been thinking about technology is I realized that we have this kind of scientific classification of homo sapiens, but actually I think we're actually homo techne, which is we are constituted by our technology. I mean we get superpowers from it. We have this superpower of recording this podcast from thousands of miles a part. We have superpowers of wearing our glasses and being able to see better (Chatelaine, 2023).

Another major takeaway from Hoffman’s interview with Tippet is the throughline he draws when tracing the history of humanity’s relationship with technology. As it is named in the quote above, Hoffman uses the term homo techne to describe the ways in which humans have always used technologies–from pencils to word processing machines–to improve what they are capable of, and that the technological tools we create are an important part of what makes us human.

Progressive educators recognize this salient relationship between humans and technology, and from the start have provided students with the opportunity to explore and work with technology as an integrated part of their schooling experience. A prime example is the “shop” found in most progressive schools. Tom Little (2015) explains more in his book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America’s Schools. “Looking back at our history, it's easy to see how progressive schools’ modern embrace of technology, design, and invention is a natural outgrowth of shop class, which the forefathers and mothers of Progressive Education invented. It’s the crux of that whole idea of getting kids out from behind their stultifying rows of desks and working on projects, in teams” ( p. 125). A space to engage students in real world hands-on learning and making things that matter, having a designated school shop illustrates the movement’s devotion to ensuring that students have opportunities to experiment with actively using technology to learn with intention.

To expand on the progressive education movement’s stance on technology, it is important to point out that it was never enough to simply teach students how current technologies work. Instead, as Dewey (1938) put it, progressive teachers take on the problem of figuring out how to engage students in thinking about how technology can be used as “a potent agent in appreciation of the living present” and “for dealing effectively with the future” (p.23). To this end, “the difference between conventional and progressive schools’ modern attitudes toward technology is that conventional schools tend to teach students to use PowerPoint [for example] so they’ll know how to use PowerPoint, while progressive schools teach students to use PowerPoint so they’ll be able to express ideas that fascinate them” (Little, 2005, p. 114). Additionally, progressive educators engage students in asking ethical questions about the utility and impact of technology on themselves and society at-large. They model “vigilance, good judgment, and constant balancing of risks and rewards” (Little, 2015, p. 115) as vital to discerning how to use technology to both make sense of and navigate their unfolding lives.

With an eye on readying humans for life in an ever changing world, “progressive educators’ [take on the] duty [of] prepare[ing] students ‘not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for…the world of the future” (Little, 2015, p. 114). This foundational component of the progressive philosophy is an important guide as teachers consider how best to shape the next generation of homo techne. Here are some examples to illustrate the point:

In this particular moment: “[AI] can do stuff that helps us and adds to our capabilities…the capabilities aren’t just intellectual, but also creative. I think they can also be emotional…a first in our history” (Chatelaine, 2023). As a result, progressive educators might consider how they can provide students with authentic opportunities for using AI to extend their creativity–how to blend data-based insights to create new ideas or challenge limiting mindsets (Kaplan, 2023).
For social emotional learning, progressive educators might consider designing strategies for teaching students how to scrutinize the advice they get from AI-powered chatbots when asking questions about how to handle their relationships (Prothero, 2023).

All of this is summarized by the forward thinking progressive educators at Human Restoration Project. “The goal should be to [generate] a list of ways to get started using AI in the classroom while not losing our humanity in the process…If our students are to understand a future with AI, we need to see through the exaggerated hype and look past the doom-and-gloom to see these tools for what they are. We must be proactive in teaching students how and when to use AI while taking a critical lens to how it works and its potential pitfalls” (AI Handbook, 2023).

The title of a now well-cited Harvard Business Review resource warns: AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI. This sentiment is echoed by Hoffman who shares, “the future as we see it is that everyone’s going to have their own personal intelligent assistant that will be a companion as they navigate life…not just navigate the physical world superpowers, which we’ve had a bunch of with technology, but navigate our social universe, navigate our perception of ourselves” (Chatelaine, 2023). From a progressive educator’s standpoint, if emergent AI is going to be a necessity for human advancement (rather than a nonessential technological tool) it is critical that the next generation of humans (i.e. our current students) recognize their agency in shaping what their relationship with these new technologies look like. Hoffman calls this “co-evolution with technology” – “we shape our tools and our tools shape us” (Chatelaine, 2023). As a part of this process, progressive educators can “bring humanism to the fore of the current moment” and ensure that creativity, art, and beauty are defining features of homo techne’s future evolution.

Envisioning a Better Future

Given the predictions that daily interactions with generative AI will be the norm in our future society, and not the exception, then collectively we need to imagine what we want this future to look like. About this, Hoffman shares, “well, we’re just beginning to explore that. And part of what could possibly go right is you only create a better future by envisioning it and working towards it” (Chatelaine, 2023). For over a century, progressive educators have recognized that schools have the power to enlist students, teachers, and communities in actively thinking about and creating better futures. In Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916) wrote: "the conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind" (1916, p.103). At the heart of this philosophy, Dewey believed that our futures are not fixed and that education can be the key to designing and realizing a future we want to live in. I believe this fundamental principle of the ongoing progressive education movement will prove critical in the current moment. If we want to be certain that generative AI will have a positive impact on our lives, then we need to make sure that schools are carving out time for all of us to take an active role in making this vision a reality.

About the process of envisioning and creating a better future society, it is also important to note that “AI, is essentially a student of us, of humanity, and a mirror of humanity–humanity as it interacts and is represented on the internet…[and] obviously there’s a lot of garbage on the internet…which includes weird conspiracy theories and racial biases and a bunch of other stuff” (Chatelaine, 2023). To that end, administrators, teachers, and students must be equipped with strategies of the body, heart, and mind to be able to recognize false information, bias, and propaganda generated by AI. This resonates with the progressive education movement’s “enduring commitment to social justice” and goal of preparing “students for active participation in a democratic society” (Little, 2015, p. 52). It is also central to John Dewey’s (1916) vision in Democracy and Education. I’m curious to see how progressive educators can work alongside students to envision and enact generative AI’s role in creating a better future society.

A Focus on Questions

In addition to thinking philosophically or aspirationally about the role of AI in modern progressive schools, educators must also focus on pedagogy. One important area of focus, in light of how ChatGPT (and other large language learning models) work, is thinking about how teachers teach “questioning.” More specifically, it seems like an undeniable necessity of a 21st century progressive pedagogy, will focus on teaching students how to generate “good” questions (a.k.a. prompts).

Recently, the Harvard Business Review (2024) published a cover story with the following headline: “Advances in AI have caused a seismic shift from a world in which answers were crucial to one in which questions are. The big differentiator is the ability to craft smart prompts” (Chevallier, Dalsace, and Barsoux, p. 69). This same observation is noted by Tippet in her conversation with Hoffman:

Tippet: …it feels to me like a really huge piece of this shaping power, this agency that we humans have in relationship with this new technology, revolves around what…is being called ‘the prompt,’ which also feels very inadequate…let’s call it what it is…it’s the power of a better question: answers rise and fall to the questions they meet..

Hoffman: …that’s how we can be better. One of the ways that I use these AI assistants today is when I’m thinking about a topic or considering an argument. I’ll put in an argument and say, argue against this. Or, what am I missing with this? Or, what else would you add to this argument? All these different ways to shift to help me think better, to help me perceive better, help me navigate better.

Tippet goes on to point out that the incredibly insightful responses Hoffman gets from AI are largely due to the sophistication and eloquence of his questions. So what is the major takeaway? In this whole new world of generative AI, the need for humans to memorize and recall vast amounts of information is rare, but needing to know how to ask beautiful questions and think critically about the information we receive is essential.

In the same Harvard Business Review, the authors go on to explain why “inquiry as an essential skill” is vital for business leaders or virtually anyone who wants to be successful in our future world. The authors write, “leaders have embraced the importance of listening, curiosity, learning, and humility–qualities critical to skillful interrogation. ‘Question-storming’–brainstorming for questions rather than answers–is now a creativity technique” (Chevallier, Dalsace, and Barsoux, 2024, p.69). However, they point out that very few business leaders were “formally trained on what types of questions to ask” (p.69). This is why progressive education strategies like explicitly teaching students The Good Thinker’s Tool Kit (Jackson, 2001) and how to use philosophical questions like these to guide intellectual, social, and emotional decision-making throughout life should be a valued component of all students’ K-12 education in our new era.

None of this is really new to the progressive education tradition. Alfie Kohn has long explained why all of the above are essential features of progressive philosophy and pedagogy. “In progressive schools, students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they—and their teachers—have been. Their active participation in every stage of the process is consistent with the overwhelming consensus of experts that learning is a matter of constructing ideas rather than passively absorbing information or practicing skills” (2015, p. 3). As a result, assessment practices at progressive schools mirror these beliefs. Learners are taught how to ask questions about their learning, and they are taught how to use those questions to set goals, define evidence of goal achievement, and reflect on their progress. If you look around today, it seems like more and more cross sections of society–given the emergent capabilities of generative AI–are realizing why these particular qualities of progressive philosophy and pedagogy should be part of a mainstream education.

Easier to write about than it is to practice, the need for progressive education in today’s world appears to be growing. But there is still so much to learn and navigate. This is why I want to end the blog with questions of my own.

Concluding Thoughts

In 1919, the Progressive Education Association proclaimed: ”the Progressive School should be a leader in educational movements. It should be a laboratory where new ideas, if worthy, meet encouragement; where tradition alone does not rule, but the best of the past is leavened with the discoveries of today, and the result is freely added to the sum of educational knowledge” (The Park School of Baltimore, 2024). The role of generative AI in society is definitely one of the new ideas of our generation, and now a ubiquitous reality of teaching and learning in the modern world. From my vantage point, if progressive educators are to take the lead in using this new technology in schools, they must not only continue to “watch life and children alertly” (Palmer, 1937), but also determine how best to maintain the fundamental principles of a progressive philosophy while readjusting the pedagogy to meet the demands of the current moment.

Some of the questions that are guiding my own thinking through this process are as follows:

How do we maintain fundamental progressive education principles when integrating generative AI into modern educational settings? The Human Restoration Project’s Primer on Progressive Education suggests that we take our time. “Progressive practices are differentiated [from other approaches to education] because they’re not about acronyms or buzzwords, but are based on research-backed educational ideas that have existed for centuries” (see the chart on p. 7 referencing the difference between progressive education and neoliberal education). To meaningfully and responsibly integrate generative AI into schools, we must take the time to thoughtfully apply fundamental progressive education principles alongside scholarship and research.
How can we make sure we are not using AI in schools to reinforce standard paradigms of educational practice? For example, the most common AI tool that teachers report using in the classroom today are “AI-Powered educational games” (Hamilton, 2024), some of which may just require students to recognize and recall information. Additionally, the information they are learning in the games is irrelevant to their lives, only required because of some contrived school-based learning goal or standardized examination. If this is true, then AI is simply being used to reinforce the status quo of the traditional education paradigm rather than using schools as important sites for creating more thoughtful and compassionate individuals and society. Let’s make sure we don’t fall into this trap.
What is the developmentally appropriate timeline (i.e. ages and stages) for integrating learning about and with AI in schools? For example, should AI be a part of early childhood learning? What are developmentally appropriate activities for introducing generative AI to elementary aged children? Should middle schoolers learn how to spend any time interacting with AI chatbots or generated content, rather than “playing” or collaborating with their human peers? How often should high school students be able to use generative AI to help them problem solve or write scholarly papers? These questions are important and must be explored.
How can we ensure that educators have the time to be AI learners? One of the most scarce resources in education (besides teacher pay) is time. However, educators need to have opportunities to experiment with generative AI on their own before they introduce it to children. Given the everyday demands put on educators and schools, I wonder if priority will be given to this particular area of professional development. Or, will educators need to seek out AI professional development opportunities on their own?
To what degree should “learning by doing” (for all of us) drive the integration of AI into K-12 school settings? In a recent report for higher educators, one author explained, ‘it’s possible to teach students about AI by using AI–and, in many ways, that’s the best way to teach this particular lesson, since interacting with AI-enabled tools is one of the most effective paths to understanding them” (Magliozzi, 2024, p.4). If we take this approach, it will require that educators consistently and vigilantly weigh the benefits and risks if they engage in co-inquiry and exploration with AI alongside their students.
How do educators and schools navigate issues of data privacy and security when integrating AI tools and products into school settings? For example, a number of years ago (pre-pandemic), we were looking into experimenting with having the AI dog aibo as a school pet. The thinking was that students could compare and contrast their experiences with aibo and the other animals we took care of on campus. However, the cameras and facial recognition technology used for data collection and tracking in aibo did not align with the school’s student privacy policy. This is a really unique example, but underscores the vast array of data privacy and security issues related to using AI in schools that have yet to be uncovered.
How can we ensure that educator wisdom, best practice, and research drives decision making about the use of AI in schools, rather than the profit margins of AI companies and corporations? Privately-held education companies and affiliated corporations have become a growing sector in US and global markets. “As more schools, students and teachers use artificial intelligence to supplement the learning process, companies in the industry will benefit” (Guberti, 2023). With so much money on the table, it is critical that educators remain vigilant and ensure solid educational research and more importantly, what is best for their students drives decisions about how to integrate emergent AI into schools and classrooms, rather than the profit margins of industry.

This list of questions represent just a handful of the many possible considerations progressive educators will have to make as they take the lead in using new technologies in schools. And just like students of today, “now more than ever” progressive educators will need to hone “skills like critical thinking, discernment, logic, creativity, ethics, and the ability to learn and adapt continuously” (Magliozzi, 2024, p.5) as they explore the questions and reflect on where to go next. This process embodies the very standards and methods that Dewey (1916) called for when he presciently wrote: “A society which not only changes but which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs” (p. 81). While Dewey’s philosophy seemed radical at the time, now, over one hundred years later, it appears as if a progressive stance on education might be an essential component of our brave new world.

Works Cited:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Amber Strong Makaiau is a Specialist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Director of Curriculum and Research at the Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education, Director of the Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center, and Co-Director of the Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy MEd Interdisciplinary Education, Curriculum Studies program. A former Hawai‘i State Department of Education high school social studies teacher, her work in education is focused around promoting a more just and equitable democracy for today’s children. Dr. Makaiau lives in Honolulu where she enjoys spending time in the ocean with her husband and two children.

Exploring A Progressive Educator’s Stance on the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Schools