From Writing to Inquiring: A New Model for Education in the Age of AI
Many are worried that students are using AI to cheat on their essays
You may wonder why I would write about artificial intelligence and education on a site concerning chronic disease and aging. The answer is simple. The doctor you depend on must be a lifelong student if she is to provide you with sound up to date advice that you can trust and rely on. Medical science is moving at warp speed. There are thousands of medical journal articles on a single topic. It is impossible to keep up with it all. That is what AI is really good at. It can crawl through a mountain of medical evidence very quickly. Internet searches on a search engine for medical evidence on a topic like adjusting metformin dosage in chronic kidney disease can be clumsy. This Pubmed search yielded 6,600 results. Most of them are not related to the specific question. If you ask AI the same question, you get this specific evidence-based answer from the journal Diabetes Care. If you ask a carefully worded question, a healthcare professional can save hours of effort and be more certain of the answer. That is one of the valuable use cases of AI for clinicians. One of the most important skills for the user of AI in this context is to learn how to ask a question based on a body of knowledge that provides new insights. I use AI in that way very frequently. I am sure that use extends to other subjects and other types of learning.
Healthcare clinicians are not the only ones who need to become lifelong learners. Successful people in the AI age will be lifelong learners also and that has huge implications for education more broadly. The concern that students are using AI to write their essays is a very real one, and it is fundamentally changing the way educators approach assignments. The fear of cheating is understandable, but simply policing the use of AI misses the more profound point: the very nature of the traditional essay as a measure of a student's intellect may be a relic of a pre-AI world. Instead of fighting a losing battle against a powerful new technology, educators should embrace it by fundamentally shifting their teaching model. The focus should move from asking students to demonstrate what they know, to teaching them how to ask the questions that lead to real understanding.
The traditional essay assignment, a staple of high school and college, was designed to test a student's ability to synthesize, organize, and articulate information they had learned. It was a perfect tool for an era when the primary challenge was accessing and structuring knowledge. But with the advent of powerful large language models, that challenge has disappeared. An AI can now perform these tasks in seconds, perfectly executing a well-structured paper that is free of grammatical errors and logically sound. In this context, an essay that receives a high grade may no longer be a reflection of a student's own intellectual work but merely a testament to their ability to provide a clear prompt to an algorithm.
The true power of AI is not in its ability to generate answers, but in its ability to process information at a scale and speed that no human can. This capability renders obsolete the educational goal of having students simply regurgitate information. The new educational model must be to teach students how to leverage this power. This begins with teaching them to ask carefully crafted, probing questions about a period in history or a topic in medicine. This is a skill that AI cannot automate. The ability to ask a good question is the hallmark of a curious and intelligent mind. It is a creative act that demonstrates a student’s capacity for critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and original thought.
Asking a good question is not a passive act; it requires a deep and solid knowledge base. A student cannot ask a sophisticated question about the causes of the American Civil War without first understanding the basic facts of the period. Similarly, a student cannot ask a probing question about the ethical implications of a medical procedure without a foundational understanding of anatomy, biology, and medical ethics. This is the crucial point that those who fear AI often miss. The more a student learns, the better their questions become. AI can then act as a powerful tool to help the student explore their questions, providing them with information, counterarguments, and different perspectives. The process of inquiry becomes a collaborative one, but it is the student, with their knowledge base, who is always in the driver’s seat.
This new model prepares students for a future where their value will not be in their ability to remember and organize information, but in their capacity to find new patterns and create new knowledge. The jobs of the future will not reward those who can perform tasks that AI can easily do. They will reward those who can ask the right questions, identify new problems, and use AI as a tool to solve them. By shifting the focus from the final product—the essay—to the intellectual process of inquiry, educators can ensure their students are prepared to thrive in an information age that is fundamentally different from the one in which they grew up.
This new model doesn't just address the problem of cheating; it addresses the core purpose of education itself. It moves the focus from rote learning to true understanding, from passive consumption to active creation, and from memorization to genuine intellectual discovery.
A well-designed AI program is intended to be a tool for precisely that purpose. It is designed to avoid the pitfalls of disinformation and emotional manipulation and, in doing so, serve as a model for restoring reason and critical thinking to a discourse that has been compromised by the attention economy.
Unlike a social media algorithm, which is designed to prioritize engagement above all else, a great AI program is built on a foundation of ethical principles that guide its operation. Its goal is not to provoke an emotional response or keep you glued to a screen.
It is designed to prioritize facts. The core purpose of a factual AI is to provide accurate and verifiable information. Its training is grounded in vast, diverse datasets, and it is built with safeguards to prevent the generation of content that is intentionally misleading, false, or based on harmful stereotypes. This is the direct antidote to the disinformation we have been discussing.
An AI's output is not driven by emotion. It does not possess biases or resentments that can be exploited for manipulation. Its responses are designed to be neutral, balanced, and informative, presenting different facets of a topic without the emotional rhetoric that shuts down rational thought.
Rather than outsourcing thinking, a high-quality AI can serve as a powerful catalyst for it. It can restore critical thinking by helping you develop better questions. It can challenge assumptions, provide counterarguments, and explore complex topics from multiple perspectives. This forces you to think more deeply, refine your line of inquiry, and engage in the kind of intellectual process that Jung saw as a defense against the collective mind.
By providing a clear, concise summary of a topic, an AI can equip you with the foundational knowledge you need to ask more sophisticated questions. It allows you to move past the simple "who, what, where" and get to the "why" and "how," which are the questions that lead to true understanding.
In a world where emotional rhetoric and unverified claims are tmation and communication with a commitment to reason, critical thinking, and a resistance to the emotional manipulation that has become so pervasive. AI can be wonderful or horrible. It is up to us. Let’s do everything we can to be sure it is a great tool that helps us translate the huge volumes of medical writing that have not he norm, a well-designed AI is a model of what rational discourse can be. It presents information calmly, factually, and without appeal to emotional bias. This serves as a reminder that reasoned debate is not only possible but is the essential ingredient for a functioning society.
In this sense, a great AI is not just a tool but a reflection of the principles we need to reclaim. It is a model for how to approach inforbeen analyzed in enough detail to help us live longer and healthier lives.