TL:DR – there are none.
It’s my custom, on the first day of the new school year, to give an assembly to each of our Senior School pupils. One for Year 7, one for Year 8 and one for everyone in Years 9-13. This means I am wheeled out half a dozen times in the day, but it does allow me a platform to do what Heads love to do: give the young people the benefit of our hard-won wisdom.
And wisdom, or rather its acquisition, was the theme of my talk to Years 9-13. Specifically, the dichotomy between our jet-propelled information age tempting us to hasty and very public online judgements, and the slow-burn development of the wisdom needed to make sure those judgements hold water.
You’ll know from your own experience, but perhaps more particularly that of your phone-aged children, that an enormous amount of online content tempts us to respond to what we are sent, whatever its nature. That could mean an emoji, a repost, a comment on matters as diverse as cute cats (😻) and world crises (“I stand with…”).
A lot of this is entirely benign. There’s no harm in 😍-ing a lovely photo of your friend’s family gathering. We may even be reaching the time when not to do so is seen as a slight.
However, there’s no doubt that we are increasingly encouraged, almost required, to make up our minds on a wider range of issues, more quickly and constantly, than ever before. Similarly, tech enables us to do some things, big things, better and/or faster: buying a house, for example, can now be done very quickly.
Purchasing property, though, or any number of weighty decisions – for example on matters ethical, moral or personal – are still best made after weighing up evidence and making judgements over relevant issues: can I really afford that house? Do I really understand enough to reach a position, let alone post, on issues dividing politicians and commentators around the globe? Who will I help if I strike a position which doesn’t brook opposition?
As such, technology is allowing us to do many things faster but also inviting us to speed up processes which need time to work. We don’t expect to be able to accelerate learning an instrument or skill or creative technique: it takes time and repetition. But do the many shortcuts offered by AI destroy that argument? Can we acquire these deep skills, this wisdom, on the fly?
MIT has published research on the impact of using Large Language Models (LLMs) in essay writing. The research focused not on the quality of essays written using LLM, but on the impact of using it (or not) on the individual: for example, or the development of interpretation and judgement through researching and writing.
MIT concluded that while LLMs took some of the graft out of accessing information, this came ‘at a cognitive cost’. LLM-users didn’t feel motivated to evaluate what the LLM was churning out, or to critique or evaluate its content. Very few of the participants reported not following the LLM’s ‘thinking’. They just plopped it down in the essay and moved on.
For that group, all that really remained after the essay was handed back was the mark. Regardless of how well they had done they reported less satisfaction than the brain only group, due to having taken short cuts. They had little to celebrate: they were pretty much the same person, unchanged, ungrown, no wiser, no more perceptive, than before they submitted the essay. By contrast, the brain-only group – those who had relied on their own powers rather than AI’s – reported higher satisfaction.
Moreover, the research concluded that LLMs, while offering “unprecedented opportunities for…information access,” could negatively impact “cognitive development, critical thinking, and intellectual independence” – a possible consequence that “demands very careful consideration.” Quite so.
My hunch is that this is just as true when it comes to developing our opinions and our beliefs. This isn’t a process which should or can be speeded up, for which there should be a short cut. For a judgement to stand up it needs to be anchored in things we have read, debated, mulled over, talked through and, in some cases, agonised over. A swiftly reached judgement over a moral or political hot potato is no more convincing, reassuring or rewarding than an LLM essay, the product of algorithms. And this is where schools and schooling, and wider reading, can help: they supercharge our children’s ability to learn how to interpret issues and find solutions, discover how to digest and apply information, and achieve growth and wisdom through experience.
None of this is to say that we, or our children, should be turning our backs on debate or exchanges of views on social media. I don’t do it, but not because I think it’s wrong: it’s merely not how I grew up. If I did, though, I would want to argue for nuance, for extended exchanges which start out in the belief that minds, all minds, are open; that positions aren’t fixed or tethered to one’s identity. For a process that meant that, even if I don’t agree with someone on education or taxation or human rights or membership of the European Union I could still be that person’s friend or colleague or, at the very least, someone I could talk to about things that matter. I’d like to avoid feeling that there are opinions I must have to avoid being excluded, or opinions I must put on, because these opinions won’t be the result of research, of hearing multiple voices, of weighing up contradictory perspectives, of differing contexts and experiences. To keep your hearts open to new people, you have to open your minds.
And so, as I told Years 9-13, some things simply can’t be speeded up; there are no short cuts to developing your own wisdom. Real understanding takes time and effort. In the online world, that means that when we post or comment we build in the time and words to acknowledge that we can’t be certain and that we’re only posting when we want to learn and explore. And away from the online world we turn our backs on short cuts, tempting as they will be, understanding that we will only really walk tall and feel proud of who we are and what we have achieved when we have done the work ourselves, and done it well.
About the author Adam Pettitt, Head Adam has been Head of Highgate since 2006. He was previously Head of Modern Languages at Abingdon School and then Deputy Head at Norwich School. He read French and German at university and continues to teach both subjects to Y9 pupils at Highgate. Beyond work, Adam enjoys running marathons and is a recent convert to inter-railing.
