Maine
Opinion: Maine DOE should not be stirring fear of AI
Last week, I spent three days at the Maine Department of Education’s annual educator summit. I attended because I wanted to see how teachers were being trained and what initiatives the Department would introduce this year. What I saw there shocked me.
The department is scaring teachers into believing that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will render the subjects they teach obsolete, and that the education system must be reimagined to teach and measure soft skills that cannot be automated away, like adaptability, empathy and problem solving.
Over the next month, the MDOE is hosting community meetings across Maine where they will introduce these ideas under the banner of “Measure What Matters: What Makes a Great School in Maine?” I attended one of these meetings alongside a group of teachers at the summit. The facilitator started by asking the group, “What is something you had in school that doesn’t exist anymore?” Teachers mentioned things like cursive writing, home economics and rote memorization.
Then, the facilitator played us a video showing various jobs whose workers had been replaced by robots and AI. We saw a montage of self-driving trucks; automated restaurants, farms and factories; drone deliveries; and robot surgeons, all set to ominous violin music. The facilitator herself acknowledged that this video routinely invoked fear in viewers.
Given this world of rapid automation and technological change, we were told, schools must change too. It no longer makes sense to have traditional, siloed subjects like English, math and science. Instead, schools should teach broader skills: creativity, social intelligence and entrepreneurship. Subject knowledge no longer makes sense because students can just Google or ChatGPT answers to questions.
We were also told that schools need to do away with “old smart,” defined as what you know and how much you know, and replace it with “new smart” defined as students’ capacity to “not know” and “continuously stress-test their beliefs about how the world works.” Perhaps George Orwell should have been clearer that 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
These themes were echoed by MDOE Commissioner Pender Makin in her keynote address at the summit. She told us that “change is so rapidly advancing that we can’t with any confidence predict what the world is going to be like,” warning of a deluge of information and misinformation churned out by generative AI. She spoke of the societal need for “bold, self-directed entrepreneurial creators and makers who can think on their feet.”
Let me be clear: There is no reason to turn our backs on traditional education practices because of advances in AI. Literacy, numeracy, knowledge and wisdom remain – and will remain – the most important skills teachers can impart to our children.
We should, by all means, teach students to use new AI tools in a safe and effective manner. But the idea that technological progress requires the abandonment of common-sense academics and quantitative measures of school success is science fiction.
What the MDOE’s new dystopian turn is meant to conceal, quite obviously, is that Maine schools have been rapidly declining by any objective metric. The department’s own numbers show that 35% of students score below state expectations in English, 51% score below in math, and 64% score below in science.
Once a top-ranked state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Maine’s lackluster performance in recent years has prompted the department to try to discredit the test. Maine even ranked last in the U.S. News and World Report’s 2024 state high-school rankings, with only two Maine schools in the top 25% nationally.
It’s not AI, robots or automation that are threats to our students succeeding in a technologically sophisticated future. It’s a department that is willing to abandon tried and true educational methods and metrics for new-age platitudes and futurist fantasies. Their experimental programs have not worked in the past, and they will not work now. Instead, Maine students will fall further behind on the fundamental knowledge and skills they need to succeed.