The High Schools Going All-In on AI

0:00A few months ago, my colleague Sam Shekner 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 all I have also a text. And you know, basically he showed them some sort of game-like activities that he'd created with chat GPT for them to practice their Spanish. And then give chat GPT the problem that you have there. Yes, my dear, the same one. So you should have... 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.

1:09They 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. And 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. If you don't have to worry about the grammar, it just... If the chat can tell you if you have made a mistake and you can correct it afterwards.

2:15Why does what's happening in Estonian matter to people who are not living in Estonia? Estonia, right. It's a small country. It's bordering Russia. It's different language. It feels pretty far away. But this is really the first big deployment in high schools of chat GPT, 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. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Thursday, September 24th. Coming up on the show, Inside Estonia's High School Experiment with AI.

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4:27When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Disco to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed here. Indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. Hirey now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. 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, new shows in Estonia showed kids rushing toward computers.

5:28Its designers point out that internet and modern technologies have become an integral part of daily life. They're extremely proud of this. This 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. 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. One school that's part of AI leap is located in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. During his visit, Sam met with the school principal. Andrek Lilamagi. He is the principal of Tallinn Pellagulina State High School or Perg as it's known.

6:35If you would like to see the school, maybe you would also want to see it. Sure. Show me. It's a beautiful school. And, you know, Indrek himself uses AI tools. He tells me he does some vibe coding and, you know, the school ethos that he set up is very human and, in fact, in the school that 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 teacher 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 my other one. Yeah, but the thing is that they use it anyway. They always use it. So, yeah. So I don't believe that AI leap pushes them to use it more. Yeah. Students might already be using AI. But, Andrek told Sam that he's worried about students using the tools on their own.

7:38And how could affect their ability to learn? If 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. 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.

8:39Back 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. You think your whole pedagogy, because if the point is the effort, then the grade or the output kind of don't really matter anymore. 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

9:45eliciting answers from his students by asking questions. That's sort of the the the co-ing of the Socratic method. Under the AI leap, Estonia took the Socratic method and applied it to the school's version of Chatty PT. 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. And they're going to try to figure out a way to use it in a way that promotes learning rather than undermines it. So rather than being just an answer machine, which it is now from 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 Perger are in the process of learning. It's not hard to imagine some version of the future where the Socratic Chatbot does all the teaching, or each student has their own personal AI teacher.

10:52I want the next study to be pleasing classroom, yes. But that is not what Indrek Lilemagi's school is pushing for. He actually wants his teachers to play a more active role. One teacher that Sam met at the school is Agna Cossk, the head languages teacher. I don't believe in AI as this thing that will personalize education because then it means that everybody is sitting in their own room somewhere and that it doesn't work. They need to talk more than ever. Sam watched his Agna try to get students in an intermediate English class to use this Socratic Chatbot during an exercise. Yeah, are we going to use school AI? Yes, so this is something that I do recommend. Use your school account. Agna Cossk was looking at trying to get the students to at once practice their English by chatting with 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.

11:56So let's 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. Now, 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 for the studies advice from AI, how would you do this? 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 Chatbot to make the prompt. I gave it a little bit of information. So I have this high school class. I gave it the sort of the task that we were going to do at the end, so they have to do it. Sam looked over one student's shoulder and 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.

12:58Yeah. And then she just started to ask these questions about the future. And here I started to just say what you. Yes, what it was. Pilot flight attendant sports coach. Yes. Those are your. Yes. At the end of the assignment, Agnit 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 Chatbot. He 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. 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 and education oriented tool designed by grownups. Right? I'm curious how do you use AI? No, we don't. You don't? No, really. No.

13:58But the students think of AI leap is next. Even a marching bandwick up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that.

14:58But for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pasquies, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. So, let's talk about the students. How are the students in Estonia 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. And Agnacosks English class, for example. The chatbot keeps switching between Estonian and English. It's said that I will talk to you in Estonia to support you better. Even though the prompt said please you speak to English. It's so smart.

15:58It thinks you're trying to do a strategy. Yes, 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. But the bigger nuisance was this the cratic element of the chatbot. Or it asks more questions instead of just giving the answer. I spoke to some kids who are basically like, I'm so over it, I get it. You know, AI is going to make my brain rot. But like, you can't, you know, can a please stop asking me questions. Like, I don't know. 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 you have with porridge? And they have excuses after you. I used the normal change of the study to teach. Even for school. Yes. Yeah.

17:01Another student uses chatbot sometimes. But actually avoids AI when it's a subject he really cares about. Mathematics and stuff, AI, a lot of times wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a way, in a way, you're deciding what you think is. Where you want to practice and where you want to get stronger. When I feel like I'm stronger, something I use, I feel like I'm weak or something. I especially learn it, my friend. Yeah. An extent. And then, there are the kids who don't want to use AI at all. You find the AI. I really didn't. I think it was a waste of my time. I don't use it because I'm afraid I'll just pick up lazy. I think that you don't need to do that job, but then who does that job for you and for what host? 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.

18:06I 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. It's terrible. At the end of last school year, about 65% of Estonian students with access to the school's socratic version of Chatship-T had activated their account. But only a minority of students use it regularly. This year, Estonia is opening up the AI assistant to 12 graders and vocational school students too. At the school in Tallinn, Sam spoke to the student body president, a 12th grader named Cordelia Violet-Pap. She is really adamantly opposed to AI. I'm really, really strongly against it, overall. Specifically, the language models and generate the AI.

19:06She 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, does it really fix the bigger problems with AI and learning? Just the fact that we have been given this does not stop students from using normal Chatship-T 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 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 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. Cordelia has since graduated, but she told Sam that earlier this year,

20:08she stood up in front of the school at a talent show and read a poem she wrote about AI. Let me see. Maybe this one, 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 about all of the new vocabulary that AI was unleashing on all of us. I don't even know how to translate them, but maybe it's just interesting to hear for you. 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, siphon, AI, Blunder, brain rot?

21:08These are so ugly. And for what? We don't need a way to express yet another world. What if the answer to this big AI experiment in the classroom turns out to be that this is a bad idea and it's not working, that it harms education? I think that's part of the entire landscape within which the AI leap is trying to navigate. How can we make this a positive thing, as opposed to worrying about these downsides and just saying we're just going to say no and put our heads in the sand? And it points up a really deep tension when it comes to AI and education, because like most of us actually, there are two minds about it. They're scared of it and they also see great opportunity and they don't want to get left behind.

22:12What do you think we'll learn from Estonia? We're going to just have to see how the experiment turns out, you know, and what the educational results are in Estonia. Are we going to see kids doing better? Are we going to see that this is helping educational outcomes? Because if Estonia can chart a path for this to improve educational outcomes, then that really could make an impact on schools all the way from boys to Botswana. That's all for today. Thursday, September 24th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you give your podcasts, route every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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