To learn or to succeed?

I still remember, when several of my science teachers, both in matric and in FSc, would skip certain chapters in the text, not because they did not contain useful information, or because they were not central for understanding the subject, but simply because the material in those chapters was unlikely to appear in the exam.

The teachers had seen plenty of exams to know what topics were likely to appear, and which ones were unlikely. And they were almost always right. My teachers wanted students to only learn what was relevant - not from an educational perspective - but from the perspective of success in the exam. At that time, I found this strategy to be quite appropriate, and much to my liking. I had to cram less material, and not focus on things that were extraneous to my success. The only goal of a class, in my immature mind, was to do well in an exam, and my teachers were helping me achieve that goal. It was all about efficiency and success, not actual learning.

Apparently, my experience was not unique. A friend, who had gone to a well-regarded engineering university in the country jokingly remarked years later that he was a pretty good civil engineer, except that he could not do bridge construction projects, as his teacher had skipped the sections on beams, because no final paper had asked a question on beams for the past several years! Why learn something that you won't be tested on?

Years later, I would struggle with the skipped topics of my high school curriculum because I lacked the foundation. I had to relearn material that should have been familiar. That efficiency strategy of my teachers would cost me way too many hours and headache in later years.

Some three decades later, I am hearing similar arguments about efficiency and success from teachers in Pakistan. The focus, it seems, is still on 'success' and not on learning. A recent conversation with a group of teachers who have had nearly three decades of experience teaching biology, and have won many awards over the years, turned to the use of AI in high school biology classes. The teachers' entire argument in support was that students are able to get answers faster and make fewer errors using AI tools. AI - in the teachers' minds - was the path to do more in less time. Efficiency! As I have heard from so many other teachers and instructors, in communities near and far, these teachers said that AI is a tool that is fast, accessible and mostly free. AI will help their students succeed so why not use it? The idea that AI is a tool and people need to be familiar with new tools is not a bad one. Indeed, we should all be aware of what is out there, and try to understand how well these things work, and their inherent limits. But what I have struggled with is, where does actual learning of high school students fit in this whole "tool" narrative? How are we defining success? And why does success and learning have to be mutually exclusive? Finding answers quickly - some of which are inaccurate and problematic - is not what learning is about. Neither is having a system generate text that could be cut and pasted for an assignment that required actual and original work. Learning is not always easy or painless. But there is great joy on mastering a topic, on figuring out from mistakes, on tracing back one's steps and figuring out the missteps. There is also the finite chance of stumbling upon new insights and having the Eureka! moments. All of these things make learning the most precious part of our lives.

When teachers tell students to only take the easy road, they take away the immense joy that comes from the figuring out the hard stuff after a serious effort, and worse, rob them of the chance to make an original discovery, no matter how small. And in doing so, they weaken the very foundation of education: the opportunity to learn from one's mistakes.