Justin Reich

And so not teaching anything about AI is to leave kids without agency in this world that they're graduating into.

On the other hand, you know, I really appreciate there's a media studies professor at MIT, Justin Reich, and he says like, "We actually don't know how to teach AI because it's too new.

And the best thing schools could do is, uh, be honest.

Be honest with parents.

I have not read it in its entirety, but I know that there are some of the really interesting pieces of it is that it talks about being humble and bold at the same time, teaching with intentionality, adapting to an AI world.

One of the things that's interesting about AI in MIT is that they had put out a paper a few years ago with Eric Hopper and Justin Reich about how AI was an arrival technology, and it sort of landed on everybody, and everybody was adapting to it, and they were sort of freaked out.

And it was a little bit of a naysaying take of like, we don't know what this is going to do, and we can't really figure it out fast enough.

And this doesn't seem like that so far.

And sometimes I talk to someone and I'm like, "Yeah, this is a really big deal." Today's conversation, not that.

[gentle music] I'll be talking to Justin Reich, a researcher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, about AI's likely impact on K to 12 education.

This is not my first conversation about AI in education.

I recently spoke with one of my colleagues here at Kellogg, Sebastian Martin, who has entirely reimagined many aspects of how he teaches his MBA students in ways I find pretty inspiring.

But he's admittedly an edge case.

Like if you accidentally ended up having Beethoven as your piano instructor and he gave you a warped sense of what piano lessons typically look like.

Justin Reich, on the other hand, does have a sense of what lessons typically look like.

Not those designed by tech-savvy professors at top-ranked business schools, but in the rest of the world, where budgets are limited, professional development is scarce, and time and time again, technology has entered the classroom only to fail to live up to its promise.

That's fascinating.

I don't know if you listened to the podcast I did with Justin Reich from the MIT who says that we cannot teach AI literacy because we have no idea how to teach it.

So I'm really curious to know what exactly do you teach in your AI literacy curriculum? And do all students go through that curriculum from grade 6 to 12? Or do you leave that for all the students?

Yeah, great question.