Teachers warn AI is impacting students' critical thinking

The root of the problem is way, way older than AI. It's a mix of
humans being naturally lazy, typically not developing skills or knowledge unless we're clearly getting something out of it
we have a thoooousand tools enabling us to do stuff without skill/knowledge
our education systems do not value self-improvement enough to promote the development of those skills and knowledge
So it's a lot like you not remembering phone numbers by heart because you can check them in your contact list, you know?
And, yes, text generators do play a role on that. But when it comes to critical thinking, it's a death of a thousand cuts.
- Exactly. Just the latest VC technological advancement to exacerbate existing problems. The lack of critical thinking is why the far right has room to breathe, let alone brainwash entire populations.
  The sad part is that it’s likely all by design. Turn everyone into sheep then line them up for slaughter.
  
  Dunno if it's by design, "bug turned into feature", or simply neglect. In any case, the result is the same, though - masses that are easy to manipulate, composed of dysfunctional individuals.
  The lack of critical thinking is why the far right has room to breathe
  100% this. People often say "you're not immune to propaganda", and that's true - complete immunity is impossible. However, critical thinking does raise your resistance, as it makes you less eager to swallow bullshit.
- Then when you factor in the U.S. public schools' approach to children who do think critically, it gets even worse. Kids in school are encouraged to stay silent and accept what they're told. A kid who openly questions something a teacher says is liable to get into trouble, both officially by the teacher, and socially by their peers who can't yet grasp the concept of an authority figure being wrong.
  Teachers can share false information all they want, and if a student dares to call out an urban myth, the student can be sent away to the principal's office. Now the teacher can continue spouting whatever non-fact-checked nonsense they like, the rest of the kids are discouraged from speaking out if they recognize something false, and the critical thinker is labeled a trouble-maker both by the administration and by classmates. It's an authoritarian hat trick that keeps a lot of kids in line.

"System designed around teaching students to memorize shocked to learn students are not learning to think. More at 6."
- You're a fool if you don't think our modern public education system is deliberately fucked by half a century of persistent conservative fuckery

Sure! Here's an analysis of how AI may impact critical thinking in students: A lot of students have been known to use AI to write their essays and homework, which may have a negative impact in their learning process, since they are not using their own skills to think about their assignments. This has been reported several times in the media, specially because sometimes students forget to erase the first lines of the AI answers, which are typically directed to the user, and make it easier to detect that the answer was produced by AI.
But don't worry, if you need anything else, I'm here for you!
- Ah, the age-old debate of AI in education—where the line between 'assistance' and 'assignment' gets blurrier than a chalkboard after a day of lectures! While it's true that AI can sometimes be the 'ghostwriter' for essays, let's not forget that it can also be a fantastic tutor, offering instant feedback and endless patience. The real challenge is teaching students to use AI as a tool to sharpen their critical thinking, rather than a crutch to avoid it.
  Imagine if calculators had never been allowed in math class because they 'did the work for you.' We'd still be stuck on long division while the world moved on to algebra! The key is balance—using AI to enhance learning, not replace it. And as for those telltale AI intro lines, well, consider them a modern-day 'cheat sheet' detector—a gentle nudge to remind students that original thought is still the gold standard.
  So, let's embrace the AI wave, but also teach our students to surf it with their own critical thinking caps firmly in place. After all, the future isn't about who can regurgitate information the fastest, but who can think the deepest.
  
  AI is not like calculators. Calculators are simple, it's purpose is clear and it's easy to asses the extent to which it fulfills it, they are also open source, if anything because they are easy to reverse engineer. AI is a closed source product meant to be commodified or served as a service for a profit by private companies. They are monumental proyects built on tons of energy and patented material unduly acknowledged, nobody knows how they really work and there's neither public funding for research nor open source ecosystems to provide alternatives. Their owners dont care about kids and their skills, they care for money. So the problem is not that we are ignoring the ai wave, the problem is that the wave is being steered by a private actor over whom we as a society have no control. Even if you wanted to teach kids to use ai intelligently, nothing garantees you actually can, since its owner may declare banktupcy or just change it without saying and you will have a new problem to deal with. So yeah fuck ai. I'm a robotics teacher in middle school and I do teach ai btw, I just dont encourage it's use. I just teach how it works and how to use it as a better search engine. This is more so because I have to rather than because I want to.
- I think students tend to turn to AI when there workload is to much
  
  Students will take whatever shortcut they can to be done with it as easily as possible.

I've literally done my own study on this with CS students and found a similar result. Students who reported using AI regularly couldn't recognize when it wasn't giving them any useful output

No duh
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
- That's just the paper I was thinking of.

Critical thinking not being a core class in the curriculum is hurting student's critical thinking. Its not something you develop by default.
- Our Current Affairs teacher pulled this move, spring of '89 for context:
  Paper boy drops off a stack of the afternoon edition, teacher picks one up and seriously peruses it for a minute.
  Reading from the paper: "Please pay attention. 'President George Bush has announced that an offensive action has begin against Iraq. US Air Force tactical bombers led the assault on Baghdad at 4AM this morning while grounds troops have taken positions on the outskirts.'" And so forth. "Discuss."
  We excitedly kicked this around for 20 minutes. First time GenX was at war! He then showed us the headline: Local Man Wins Regional Bike Race.
  "Every one of you believed what I said because you thought it was written in the newspaper." Stunned silence. "Discuss."
  He was county or state teacher of the year for '88 and promised an automatic A to anyone who could make him smile, even once. We had no clue if he was a Democrat or Republican, no clue as to his opinion on anything.
  And just look around lemmy. Hundreds of upvotes because people thought Vance made a serious comment about Greenland being cold. (It was an obvious joke to the troops if one had taken a moment and thought, "Surely fucking not." and watched 25-seconds of video.)
  
  Something rubs the the wrong way about how the teacher presented that problem. Was the lesson supposed to be "don't believe anything unless you can verify it yourself"? In his example, he was the unreliable source. I'm assuming he was infering the paper can also be an unreliable source? I'm hoping he went into the importance of checking multiple, credible sources to get a larger picture, rather than just leaving it at "you always might be lied to". A blanket "don't trust so-called authorities for facts" is how we end up with people questioning vaccines and flat earthers turning from satire to something troubling.

My coworkers too

The average human's critical thinking skill was already low before AI, so...
- That's largely thanks to religion.

It is, but we stopped teaching it literally decades ago, so what are kids supposed to do?
That was a victim of No Child Left Behind, along with a lot of other important shit.

Intellectual labor is hard and humans don't like doing difficult things, paired with a culture that's increasingly hostile to education and a government that wants you ignorant- it's easy to see how this happens in the US.

Yeah but that's the plan

Maybe the teachers will actually teach now
- Teachers can't teach outside a prepackaged, purchased curriculum. It's not their fault.
  
  Sure tell those math teachers that "care about students" or any teacher.

Good
It's been far too long we've coddled the stupid
Let them fail
Let the genuine thinking kids get the time and resources
Society got rid of Natural Selection and now we are paying the price
- an autistic person supporting eugenics, how ironic
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_supremacism
  
  It's not eugenics if it happens nautrally

It is impacting their critical thinking because the teachers aren't teaching the kids how to use AI!
My kids came home talking about an interview she did with one of her heroes. She knew all kinds of facts, including what type of dogs her hero has. I had to explain to my 8 year old that an AI doesn't know very much, but it will never tell you that it doesn't know something.
I don't mind that my kid's school uses AI for learning, but I am pissed at how they are using it the exact wrong way. It should go side by side with learning critical thinking.
- Public education has been deliberately stripped of critical thinking concepts by half a century of conservative fuckery, don't pretend this is a new thing
  
  I never said that it was a new thing, what I'm saying is that the introduction of AI in the classroom is the perfect way to bring critical thinking back to the classroom. That's one thing that AI is good at... getting people to realize that something they've just been told might not be 100% true.
- It's illuminating to ask an LLM a question, and then say it was wrong. In my experience they will do a 180 every time.
  
  Me: ask a question
  Ai: wrong answer A
  Me: it's wrong because of X
  Ai oh my bad, it's C
  Me: C is also wrong because of X
  Ai: my bad, the final absolutely correct answer is A!
  Repeat.

Didn’t teachers have a similar argument against using calculators?
AI is simply a tool.
- While i agree, don't pretend this isn't orders of magnitude different in how it can effect how people go about solving problems.
  Behavioral psychology is going to have fun unraveling just how it changes people's action and thinking.
  
  A web search was orders of magnitude different then going to a library to look up sources.
- Kinda - it was about people being unable to do maths if they rely too much on calculators. And it's actually a valid argument, if you care about mental maths.
  There are two differences here, though:
  Calculators are rather good at simple calculations. Large language models suck at outputting anything resembling critical thinking. They're always bullshitting, and unless you have good critical thinking you'll swallow bullshit after bullshit, because your tool requires a skill that you don't have due to your unrestricted usage of that tool.
  Critical thinking is a considerably bigger deal than being able to do simple maths by head or by hand.
  you should - it's often faster and less laborious to do coarse maths by head than by calculator, and it allows you to spot errors you wouldn't otherwise. Same deal with any other tool, tools are great but you should be able to do the basics without them too.
- A tool for what? Automated writing?
  This is like trying to tell people you won't through driver's ed, because you rode a bus a bunch of times.
  The point of the coursework is to have the children show that they can relate information in a specific way. Showing the information isn't the point, the exercise of constructing the answers themselves in the point.