E-Book: Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined

While Chinese policy-makers have wanted to implement AI in education for years, EdTech has always been too fragmented for AI purposes. The COVID-19 crisis offers a rare opportunity for Beijing to step in and consolidate the various EdTech platforms controlled by local governments.

AI in education promises to help “left behind” children, while at the same time it also risks further alienating them. The success of AI in China’s education system is highly dependent on the approach China’s government takes in introducing it into the system.

China’s Choice An AI system in education can focus either on improving test scores, or improving classroom teaching.

Improving test scores seems the easier choice, with the most immediate benefit. Imagine a system in which students are doing test questions all the time. With its database of every test question ever written, the AI system can figure out students’ knowledge gaps, and then pepper students with customized tests. They will not understand the material, but their test scores will go up, and that’s all that matters.

Such a system would mean that Chinese education becomes “slave to the algorithm,” and teachers lose their professional autonomy, becoming nothing more than ICT assistants. This will mean that China’s “left behind” children become truly so.

To understand why, let’s talk about the 1995 book Meaningful Differences by the two American researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley.

For over two years, they recorded the words spoken at home in professional and poor households, and coined the phrase “30 millionword gap by age three.”

A technologist would think there’s an easy solution here: design a robot to converse with a poor child.

Hart and Risley argue that would be the wrong approach. It doesn’t matter how many words are said. What matters is how words are said. Poor parents treat their children as subordinates: “Don’t touch that!” Rich parents treat their children as equals: “Let me explain why touching that is dangerous.” That’s why Hart and Risley think poor parents should play board games with their children.

Let’s look at a classroom example of this idea. In 1968, in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an American third-grade 74 |