A lot of people keep on saying that the quality of education has fallen off real bad. Yes, I actually side with this narrative most of the time. Why? Because back in the day the education system was not this bad and people were actually studying and remembering what they studied. The problem is we are still learning what people of 100 to 200 years ago were studying. Back in the day there was nothing like AI which could help you do your assignment. You had to either wait for a colleague to figure it out or how dm figure it out by yourself.
I’ll use myself as an example. When I was in JHS I used to know simple multiples. It was so cause I had to if not I’ll end up struggling in the exams halls. For things that I didn’t know I had to find a way round it cause I knew I’ll need it one day. Fast forward into senior high then we had calculators. I’ve always said that calculators has got to be one of the most effective tool at destroying your knowledge of simple maths.
Cause at one point you end up confirming with the calculator for what is 3 multiply by 5 and it’s sad. Back at jhs you could get this answer in 10 seconds off your head but with the calculator you’ll get this in 3 or less seconds.
Where am I heading to? I am trying to say that most of the time we use the old ways to judge situations which are off the new ways. I might not side with the idea of using mobile phones in class as I believe it’ll make studies dumb as calculators do. Yh yh, I know people will say that for some things we can’t just use our heads but then I say that the fact still remains that it hurts us.
So I don’t side with the idea of mobile phones in schools as it’ll make things worse. When we were in the university we use to sneak in mobile phones into mid semester exams so that AI could show us what code to use. At a point in time we realised that we were not learning anything as we were dependent on the mobile phones very much. One will say that but even after school you’ll be allowed to use your phone whiles coding but if you don’t know how to code in the first place you might not even know how to instruct the AI to build a code for you.
Without prior knowledge you might not even know how to find bugs in the code that the AI has produced for you. At the end of the day the AI tool is a helping hand which was build by humans and it’s bound to make mistakes as well. Even though I can agree it’s good at code.
Allowing students to use phones might be easier for them in the long run but I think this will also call for the curriculum to be revised as well as the scheme will need to be changed.
