Critical thinking is vital

Technology in education has come a long way. Over the past decades, there have been many transitions and growth in facilitating knowledge with technology.

This journey was revolutionized by the coming of computers and internet services. Learning and researching become easier. There was a time that researchers moved from library to library, university to university, and from one research institute to another in search of knowledge about their projects, especially past published articles. Publishing a research article could take months or years during that period.

However, the coming of computers and the internet has made it easy for researchers to access articles at the tip of their fingers. Publishing an article can now be done in weeks or months depending on the depth of the research.

The same thing can be said of learning generally. A student doesn't necessarily need to be searching for paperback books before solving an assignment like it used to be many years ago. All they need to do now is to visit a search engine on the internet and ask their questions. This has really improved accessibility to learning materials.

In recent years, a reigning game changer in the academic circle gained prominence. It is called artificial intelligence, AI. It has come to disrupt the traditional ways of learning and researching. It has redefined the scope of teaching and learning. However, one of the major challenges with the application of AI is to establish where to draw the line. Many people now wholly depend on AI to get their academic problems attended to. It has spread laziness among some addicted users. I met a colleague in her office a few months ago preparing her students' results. She was using Meta AI to do some simple additions. I mean trying to add figures that sum up to less than 100. How will a teacher be using AI to do such basic mathematics?

Just like this colleague of mine, many lecturers and students have abdicated their role to AI. From teaching and researching to setting assessment questions, many teachers depend on AI. This will not augur well for academic excellence in the long run. It breeds intellectual laziness.

However, this is not as scary to me as giving the students unfettered access to phones in classes and tests. Especially when they have access to the internet and AI. Don't be surprised to see a student asking AI to give him the answer to one plus one. Students will now resort to using AI to solve problems that ordinarily shouldn't be more than their cognition. This will end up killing critical thinking.

AI can never take the position of human. They remain tools created by humans to help solve problems. At a point or another, human thought is needed to navigate through a huddle. If a professional is solely depending on AI to practice his profession, he may run into a problem. This can happen when the information being sought is novel. In situations like this, it may require the professional critically analyzing the problem and proposing a way forward. I mean humans can better synthesize solutions to novel problems than AI can ever do. If that ability to think critically is not there, then it becomes a serious challenge.

The best time to train someone in critical thinking is when he is a student. He is given problems to solve in order to stimulate the thinking process. A student shouldn't miss it at this stage. I don't subscribe to students having access to the usage of their phone at every stage of their learning. There should be a room for training them to be critical thinkers.