When I was in the third and fourth grade, my elementary school teacher would write multiplication and division problems on the classroom chalkboard. Students would be called to go to the chalkboard and solve the problems in front of the class while the teacher observed. I was terrified when my name was called and vividly remember struggling with the math while my fellow class members were looking at me. If I got stuck or did the problem incorrectly, my teacher would step in and help me get to the solution. Relief came when I returned to my seat.
It was so much easier to solve my homework math problems without class peer pressure. I had to remember the various math techniques to work through multiplying numbers in tens, hundreds, or thousands. When we learned to solve problems with decimal points, more math skills were learned. I did all my math problems by hand, until my high school junior year. My chemistry and physics teacher gave her students a loaner calculator. Calculators proved to be amazing time savers: one could simply punch numbers into the calculator and gain accurate solutions within seconds, rather than spending minutes by hand to hopefully obtain an accurate solution.
During my four years of engineering classes, calculators were ubiquitous. Exams contained more questions because students could solve math problems faster using calculators. By my university junior year, the latest calculators used magnetic strips to solve complex equations. This was the next evolutionary step towards quickly solving complex equations. The evolution continued with the invention of personal computers, spreadsheets, and specialized software. While I tremble at the thought of going back to my elementary classroom chalkboard, I believe I can still solve multiplication and division problems by hand, if required. My brain has slowed, but the rote learning is there in my head.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived. Just by scanning the fastest growing technology stocks one can quickly grasp where capital is being allocated. Just this week, Oracle Corporation co-founder, Larry Ellison, surpassed Elon Musk as the richest person in the world. It was Oracle’s AI technology that caused his net worth surge by $101B after the financial markets viewed Oracle’s quarterly financial report.
I did not have AI during my formulative years. I solved math problems using the same processes as my parents and grandparents during their formulative years. I wrote essays and term papers, by hand or typewriter, like my parents and grandparents. My 1960s to mid-1970s pre-university education had not changed much from fifty years earlier. These three generations did their critical thinking using their brains, books, handwriting instruments, and sheets of paper.
Computers, now with AI software, have radically changed how children and young adults learn. Using just key words, an essay can be written by a computer. A student normally would read a book and then write a book report using critical thinking skills. Now, AI can produce a concise book summary that takes minutes to read and can also write the book report. Just like I outsourced my math computational skills to a calculator, the public has outsourced their memory to Google, their navigation skills to Google Maps, and their writing skills to ChatGPT. I suspect that our foreign language skills will be soon outsourced to Google Translation.
AI is needed to more efficiently do research in fields like health and engineering. Solving billions of laboriously repetitive mathematical problems by hand makes no sense. While doing research, using AI to look for patterns is good for society. However, side-stepping critical thinking skills to have a computer, using AI, write a research paper makes school children dumber. During the 1990s, international IQs peaked and then declined. Adult literacy and numeracy are flat or falling in most developed countries. Just last week, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released their 2024 NAEP high school scores: reading assessment was the lowest since 1992, when the study began, and math assessment was the lowest since 2005. OpenAI released ChatGPT late-2022. I predict that NAEP scores will continue to erode.
What saddens me most is that Biblical literacy continues to erode. Even if a person is an atheist, to understand morality, ethics, Western civilization, and American culture requires Biblical competency. During the Reformation (1517–1648), the invention of the printing press brought Biblical knowledge to the masses. No longer could the Christian Church control public religious information. People could easily read Scripture in their own language and use their critical thinking skills to question Church doctrine. The Pew Research Center published a 2019 survey titled “What American Know About Religion.” The survey found:
- Only 66 percent of evangelicals knew that Jesus was from Nazareth.
- Only 69 percent of evangelicals knew that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
- 25 percent of evangelicals thought the Golden Rule was one of the Ten Commandments.
Evangelicals usually pride themselves on their astute Biblical knowledge. I will go out on a limb and project that mainline Protestants and Catholic would score even lower. People who don’t attend a Christian church would have, on average, less knowledge than evangelicals. My parent’s and grandparent’s generation read the Bible and had, on average, more Biblical knowledge because society considered Biblical knowledge fundamentally important. AI can write a short synopsis on the Bible, but nothing will replace reading it critically for understanding. John Calvin (1509-1564) said it better:
“For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any book, however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written, are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly.” (Institutes, I.6.I)
