AI in Education Debate Misses the Real Question: What Does an Educated Person Need to Know?

Key facts

• Blue book sales have risen nearly 40 percent as professors return to timed, handwritten exams.
• The University of Chicago banned AI use in undergraduate social sciences core courses and banned screens in law school classrooms.
• Berkeley's law school forbids AI use on any work submitted for credit.
• Cornell completed a weeklong "unplugged" initiative encouraging students and faculty to put down devices.
• Harvard College dean David Deming urged "acceptance, or even encouragement" of AI use in assignments completed outside the classroom.
• Dartmouth president Sian Leah Beilock warned in The Atlantic that colleges risk "consigning themselves to irrelevance" if they don't lean into AI technology.
• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for AI companies to slow down days after one of his own researchers resigned publicly and warned the technology could "kill us all by the end of the decade."
• Philosopher Anastasia Berg, writing in The Chronicle Review, argued no AI use can "deepen" students' learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over unmediated engagement with original works.
• Average college GPA climbed from roughly 2.7 in the late 1980s to about 3.15 today while national measures like the ACT and NAEP declined.
• MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training released a summer report urging educators to define learning purposes first and use AI only if helpful.
• Christine Nowik, an English professor at Harrisburg Area Community College, urges teachers to stop asking about AI detection and compliance and start asking what they want students to learn.
• Joshua Katz and Solveig Lucia Gold, senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, argued in a Washington Post opinion piece that AI has scrambled any reliable link between a major and a career.