Eileen

And when we are concretizing and reducing the aims of our educational experiences in school to the output of particular kinds of skills that may be quote unquote relevant to the world today,

Oftentimes, what we're forgetting is how does the learning of that skill change the development of the person?

And those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.

The example I use to explain this is that giving kids AI to learn to do something basic that they before would have needed to know, but now AI can do it, so why bother teaching them?

is kind of the same thing as telling parents of eight-month-olds, oh, don't bother encouraging your child to crawl.

You're never going to use that skill again in your real life.

Who crawls?

Unless you lose something under the couch, you're never going to need to do this, right?

Just get right up on a bicycle.

Start riding.

Start running, right?

Of course, infants don't crawl because crawling is a useful life skill forever.

They crawl because the act of crawling enables certain kind of positionality in the world which helps them to develop themselves neurologically, psychologically over time.

And crawling is engaging networks for motion, for thinking, for reflection, for planning, for movement that then become the basis for healthy kinds of behavior that don't involve crawling later.

We need really to return to that logic when we're asking ourselves what we want for our children.

We need again to put on those scientific hats, those thoughtful hats.

We need to engage with our young people and think about how are they using the technology?

How are they experiencing this?

Are they engaging with the big ideas I want them to engage with, but they're doing it in a different format that I'm not used to because I wasn't an AI native the way they are?

Or are they actually circumventing developmental processes that we value for them?