[Cover image generated using ChatGPT]
Do your children use ChatGPT for schoolwork?
As a child of the 80’s raising my own child who is now in his first year of college, there’s an obvious generational gap between us. I’m not just talking about the usual gap between mother and son (with its hills of ups and downs), but a technology gap. Of a time when I grew up thinking that a calculator would help me in school – and now here is my son talking about how ChatGPT has influenced his classmates in helping with schoolwork.
I am left with a number of questions as a parent, and even as someone running a business, while we are at the precipice of a new kind of technological revolution.
Would it be fair to liken these AI tools to the calculator that has made Math easier? Did we do away with having to memorize the multiplication table because we could simply whip out our phones? Or is this just an awkward phase since this technology is technically new?
In a world where ChatGPT exists in schools, there seems to be no stopping it. But I am not making it sound like a bad thing. Rather, the school needs to evolve beyond memory work and facts. We are, after all, in an era where all the knowledge in the world is available literally on the palm of our hands with smartphones.
My son once shared with me his concern on what is indeed the ethics in going about schoolwork and exams when students can access ChatGPT at every turn. He couldn’t help but question if he was doing the right thing by still answering tests, reports and projects based on his reviews and stock knowledge or is it now an accepted smarter strategy to use this aid. I remember how my professors were strict on plagiarism and considers it as a form of cheating. How are students now graded fairly when ChatGPT is freely used?
I believe that incidents like these in school are golden lessons. We send our kids to school not to memorize facts, but to connect the dots of information, improve on their soft and hard skills and foster inter-personal relationships with other people. I think schools should evolve more into these aspects of our children’s lives as they will be graduating in three to four years. And what will they be graduating into? A world dominated by AI. Will the facts they memorized in school still matter at this point?
