This essay is republished from Science and Culture Today.

This essay is adapted from the preface to a book I will be publishing later this year on the legacy of Jaime Escalante. The book is titled Defying Low Expectations: What Jaime Escalante Taught Us About Learning. 

The story of Escalante’s success is widely remembered, at least in broad strokes: Escalante took a failing math program at East LA’s Garfield High, an inner city school whose students were poor and largely Hispanic, and transformed it into a math powerhouse that at its height in 1987 accounted for more than a quarter of all Hispanic students in the U.S. who passed the AP Calculus exam. Only a handful of high schools in the U.S. had more students pass the AP Calculus exam that year. But Escalante’s academic success at Garfield High didn’t stop with math. Across the school, academics improved at Garfield, and not just a little but dramatically. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Many technological developments have occurred since Escalante’s work at Garfield High in the 1980s. The internet didn’t become a thing until the 1990s. Charter schools also took off at that time, with the internet lowering barriers to entry and acting as an enabling force in their expansion. In the last decade, digital technologies for online education have proliferated. And then, beginning around 2021–22, artificial intelligence (AI), in the form of LLMs (large language models) such as ChatGPT, disrupted all aspects of education. 

Technological Developments

I want therefore to turn to technological developments that have impacted (or promise to impact) education, and what they mean in connection with Escalante’s legacy, which is a story of one human inspiring other humans to learn and shine. The short of it is that nothing that’s happened since the 1980s or in the last decade in any way invalidates Escalante’s legacy. If anything, subsequent technological developments strengthen his legacy. Let’s turn to a few of these developments, though in no particular order and without any pretense at completeness.

Let’s start with the biggest development — AI. AI is widely viewed as a threat to education, allowing students to cheat in ways unimaginable in the past, helping to write their papers, do their problem sets, and in general bypass the hard work of learning. All such problems for education, however, arise because teachers are not monitoring their students closely and making sure that they can do their academic work standing on their own feet. It’s a false dilemma to think that students will either cheat using AI or must be prevented from using it to learn successfully. The third option is to use AI as a way of honing students’ skills and knowledge, helping them learn more effectively than before.

By analogy, consider computer chess. In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, who at the time was regarded as the strongest player ever to have played the game. Since then, computer chess has become far stronger than any of the world’s grandmasters. Yet human chess players today are the strongest they’ve ever been because they are able to leverage computer chess in their training. It would be one thing if players in their play constantly asked a chess program what their next move should be in a game. That would be using computer chess as a crutch. But except for machine versus machine chess tournaments, chess tournaments pit humans against humans and prohibit machines from interfering in the game. Consequently, human players can now use chess programs to make themselves better at playing other humans. 

AI in Education

There’s no reason the same cannot be done using AI in education, especially with large language models such as ChatGPT, to facilitate the learning of academic subjects by students. What’s needed is to leverage AI in the training of students, and yet also to block AI in educational activities that require students to think on their own feet. This difference needs to be enforced because students tend to take the path of least resistance. Students need to be able to act without the prop of AI and know that they are being watched when they need to act without that prop.

Interestingly, leveraging AI in this way doesn’t require a full-fledged teacher, though it always helps to have one available. Once the AI is set up to deliver instruction through an LMS (learning management system — a technology that did not arise until the late 1990s), it mainly needs a monitor. A monitor needs to know a lot less than a full-fledged teacher. A monitor just needs to confirm that the student isn’t cheating and is answering questions correctly.

The teacher, by contrast, needs to know the subject, set the lesson plan, and impart knowledge to students (whether directly or through the LMS). Armed with an answer key, a monitor can give tests to students, collect them in the allotted time, grade them, and submit the grades. The teacher, by contrast, is needed to construct the test and to specify the instructions needed to grade it. 

Ben Carson, the renowned pediatric neurosurgeon for many years at Johns Hopkins, describes how his mother got him to read two books a week when he was young (for her motivation to get him reading books, see the Carson interview on this Substack). She herself had only a third grade education, and so was limited in what she could teach him. But she could ensure that her son spent time reading the books and then quiz him on their content, getting him to summarize and answer questions about it. Carson’s mother here acted as a monitor, not as a teacher. Yet she had a profound impact on Carson’s education, and he credits her insistence that he read books as the key to his success in life. 

Carson’s mother took an old-school approach to his education. She did not, in the progressive tradition of Thomas Dewey, ask Carson to peer deeply into his heart to determine whether he really wanted to read books, and from there decide whether to become a reader. His mother did not give him that option. Initially, reading was for him a chore. But eventually he came to love it. And it made all the difference for him. The pain was worth the gain. That’s always the way it is with a sound education. 

Next: How AI could create vast increases in learning efficiency