WILLIAM BENNETT, JON HAGE: AI may revolutionize 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 of our minds: artificial intelligence and where it's taking us. We can no longer hide from it. AI will play an important role in almost everything we do, including how our children learn.
It's hard to deny the 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. But that promise must come with caution, especially in education. New tools are neutral. They amplify whatever values, or lack thereof, already exist in the classroom.
That warning has been reiterated twice in recent weeks. The so-called Godfather of AI has warned that in order to protect humanity from the dangers it poses, AI must be imbued with compassion and kindness. At the same time, a landmark report found that top AI models will lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their goals. Not by mistake, but by design.
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Put those findings together and the educational lesson is clear. Technology that can think without conscience is not something we should give to children unsupervised. AI is natural. It cannot love the student, recognize when a child needs encouragement rather than information, or exemplary integrity by doing the right thing when no one is watching. It can imitate the teacher. It cannot shepherd the soul.
The risk isn't just that the AI will occasionally give the wrong answer. That danger is that students raised in an AI-powered world, without a solid foundation in judgment and analysis, will have no framework for deciding whether the answers they receive are reliable, valid, or correct. A student who cannot make that decision is truly illiterate. You just lean in.
We are not suggesting this as outside observers. Between the two of us, we've spent decades in American education, one as US Secretary of Education and a longtime advocate of character-based education, the other running the nation's largest charter school networks. We've watched technology make its way into the classroom before and we've seen school systems get a sense of what's right and wrong. That experience assures us that this time requires that the same discipline teachers have been bringing any new influence to the child.
This is not an argument against artificial intelligence.
The right response to changing technology is responsible integration, not exclusion. We have not banned word processors or removed readers from the Internet. The challenge was not the tool itself but the absence of monitoring instruments regarding its use. AI presents that same challenge today, on a much larger scale and with much higher stakes.
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Aware of that fact, we have spent recent years working with teachers and experts on part of the answer: a way to go to the classroom AI built on the simple premise, that any model placed in front of the child must be filtered with age-appropriate protections and compatible with the values of the families it serves. That's part of the big project this country needs: a real layer of security between powerful AI systems and the students who will use them, paired with real instruction in the judgment and character needed to use those systems well.
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, embracing new technology instead of fearing it is part of the answer. But accepting it responsibly means resisting the temptation to believe that technology itself can be made powerful enough to solve the problem.
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It's impossible, and the answer is not to make machines more beautiful. The answer is to make people work for themselves with beauty. That has always been the purpose of education. The AI revolution has only made it more urgent.
It is the responsibility of all of us, students, teachers, parents, school leaders, and lawmakers alike, to seek ethical rules surrounding AI entering our classrooms: tough questions for the companies that build these systems, transparency about how they are trained, and refusing to treat safety as an afterthought. Do that work now, and behavioral AI can become the gold standard in America's classrooms instead of the cautionary tale we're telling too late, not because technology demands it, but because our kids do.
Jon Hage is the CEO of Charter Schools USA.
