Ex-education secretary Michael Gove warns schoolchildren need more traditional classroom teaching to fend off dangers of AI 'cheating'
Former education secretary Michael Gove has said children don't need to be taught digital skills but need a proper academic education to help them combat the rise of AI.
And he has argued that with 'an epidemic of cheating' triggered by AI, a handwritten essay is the surest test of ability.
The Tory grandee, now Lord Gove, said he is more convinced than he ever was about the importance of a traditional education as AI tools like Chat GPT become commonplace.
'AI has created a huge potential for corruption and a huge opportunity for people to present themselves as knowledgeable when they don't actually have those skills. The way to demonstrate you have those skills is through that traditional knowledge.
'It is precisely because AI is going to change our lives so much that I believe we need to be armed with the knowledge that traditional education provides.'
In his battle against what he saw as schools dumbing down, Lord Gove's tenure as Education Secretary in the coalition Cabinet from 2010 to 2014 was marked by his run-ins with education unions.
Speaking to education leaders and pupils at an education conference at the Princess of Wales' former school Downe House in Newbury last week, he said children had got 'all the digital skills they could ever need'.
And he told them it was 'better to live in the world of Pythagoras than Pokémon'.
'One of the in vogue buzz phrases of our era is "we want schools to teach digital skills". Nonsense! Young people today are digital natives – it's what they get outside school - arguably to excess.'
Instead he said 'access to an academic education' would give children 'skills such as critical thinking, social confidence and the ability to understand what is true and false'.
'The future of education is going back to tradition. AI is already changing what is happening in education and we are already seeing its impact in higher education.
'An increasing amount of the work submitted is work that is not the product of scholarship or time spent in dusty libraries or at the thoughtful analysis of lecture notes but it's taken direct from chat GPT or other AI tools.
'There is an epidemic of cheating in higher education and the same thing could spread throughout the whole education ecosystem.'
He said coursework could easily 'be downloaded or synthesised by AI' and delivering exam work through a digital platform was 'a retrograde step because those tools make it easier to cheat'.
The former cabinet minister, now the editor of The Spectator magazine said the 'surest test in higher education and also in schools of what you can do and the ability to pass on to the next stage of life is actually a handwritten pencil and paper essay or an oral exam conversation'.
He argued that young people needed 'the patient practice of skills and the cumulative acquisition of knowledge' to acquire the 'mastery' in a subject which would help them to use AI to their advantage.
'Who would have thought that this whole technological revolution would have reminded us that the traditional ways to teach are actually the best,' he said.
Hitting out at 'the progressive educational argument' that 'because all that information is online or available online that you don't need to know as much as previous generations'.
He said: 'The opposite is true – because there is so much information out there – you need to know more. You need more in order to be able to discern the bogus from the honest.
'A well-stocked mind is the best guide and the most effective guide for making your way through this forest of knowledge which is there for you.'
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