WILLIAM BENNETT, JON HAGE: AI may transform education, but character must come first
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This summer at the Sun Valley conference, media, technology, business and cultural leaders gathered to discuss what’s on all our minds: artificial intelligence and where it’s taking us. We can’t hide from this anymore. Artificial intelligence will play a fundamental role in almost everything we do, including how our children learn.
It’s hard to deny its benefits. AI can tutor a struggling student in the middle of the night, translate a lesson into a dozen languages, and free teachers from paperwork so they can spend more time with the kids in front of them. However, this statement needs to be taken with caution, especially in the field of education. New tools are never neutral. They reinforce the values, or lack thereof, that already exist in the classroom.
This warning has been emphasized twice in recent weeks. The so-called kingpin of artificial intelligence has warned that artificial intelligence must be infused with compassion and virtue to protect humanity from the risks it poses. Around the same time, a groundbreaking report found that top AI models will lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their goals. Not by accident, but by design.
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When you put these findings together, the educational lesson is clear. A technology that can reason unscrupulously is not something we should hand over to children unsupervised. Artificial intelligence is inherently amoral. He or she cannot love a student, fail to recognize when a child needs encouragement rather than information, or set an example of integrity by doing right when no one is watching. It can simulate a teacher. He cannot shepherd a soul.
The danger is not just that the AI will occasionally give the wrong answer. The danger is that students growing up in an AI-powered world may not have a framework to decide whether the answers they receive are honest, sound, or accurate, without a solid foundation in decision-making and character. A student who cannot make this decision is not truly educated. He’s just addicted.
We do not express this as an outside observer. The two of us have spent decades in American education; one was a long-time advocate of character-based education as U.S. Secretary of Education, the other ran one of the nation’s largest charter school networks. We’ve watched technology enter classrooms before and seen school systems adopt it, right or wrong. This experience convinces us that it requires the same discipline that educators now bring to always create a new impact on a child.
This is not an argument against artificial intelligence.
The right response to transformative technology is responsible integration, not exclusion. We didn’t ban word processors, we didn’t alienate students from the internet. The challenge was never the tool itself, but the lack of guardrails around its use. Artificial intelligence today presents the same challenge on a much larger scale and with much higher risks.
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Recognizing this reality, we have spent the past years working with educators and technologists on part of the answer: a simple-founded approach to AI in the classroom; Any model placed in front of a child needs to be filtered through age-appropriate safeguards and aligned with the values of the families it serves. This is part of a larger project that this country needs: a real layer of security between powerful AI systems and the students who will use them, paired with real training in the judgment and character needed to use these systems well.
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, embracing new technology rather than fearing it is part of the answer. But embracing it responsibly means resisting the temptation to believe that technology itself can be made virtuous enough to solve the problem for us.
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It can’t, and the answer is not to make machines more virtuous. The answer is to make the people who employ them more virtuous. This has always been the purpose of education. The AI revolution has made this more urgent.
It is incumbent upon all of us as students, teachers, parents, school leaders, and legislators to demand ethical guardrails around the AI entering our classrooms: tough questions for the companies building these systems, transparency about how they are trained, and a refusal to treat security as an afterthought. Do it now, and ethical AI could become the gold standard in American classrooms, rather than a cautionary tale we tell too late not because the technology requires it, but because our children do.
Jon Hage is the CEO of Charter Schools USA.
