The 'Dumbing Down' Effect (AI in Education: Part 6)

The dumbing down effect: perhaps the elephant in the room that I’ve been avoiding so far in this series. Let’s face it – one of the biggest questions that comes to mind when we’re talking about AI in education might be

Is overreliance on AI turning students into passive consumers instead of critical and independent thinkers?

This isn’t just technophobic hand-wringing, but an important and real debate that’s landed squarely in our classrooms, group chats, and definitely amongst the parents of, at the very least, many of my private students.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyse, evaluate, and synthesise information logically and rationally, questioning assumptions rather than simply accepting information at face value. This involves:

-          Analysing and evaluating information objectively

-          Responding to information with logic and reason rather than simply accepting it as true

-          Applying skills like analysis, evaluation, and synthesis to solve problems and make judgments

-          Thinking in ways that are novel, self-directed, efficient, and effective

Think troubleshooting why an experiment produced green goop instead of the expected volcano, or quick rebuttals to points within a structured debate.

This skillset must be built on a solid foundation. Children aged 5-9 can’t yet take on complex reasoning, but in these early primary school ages there is a real focus on developing the basic reasoning skills and interests to provide the foundation for critical thinking later on. Formal logic is an important building block to develop. Logical thinking is not a natural human trait. If it were, we wouldn’t need to learn how to reason, and subjects like maths wouldn’t be considered so difficult. Logical thinking involves formal reasoning skills that can only be built later on in life. Critical thinking, however, builds on everyday reasoning and can be developed from a young age. Late primary age students are far more able to develop complex critical thinking skills, and this has been reflected in our curricula for quite some time.

In NSW classrooms, critical thinking is explicitly taught across subjects using strategies like deep conversations, debate, and domain-specific approaches that require students to evaluate sources, create arguments, and justify their thinking. (As a sidenote, I think this is the long-awaited answer to the question most whined by HSC students – why do we have to do English?). The point of this brief foray into the classroom is that it shouldn’t come as a surprise that critical thinking must be taught. It is not an inherent skill, and is one that requires ongoing work and growth.

Not so long ago, this learning depended on wrestling with big ideas, uncertainty, and learning the effect of actions by experiencing the consequences. You had to sit with the confusion, poke holes in arguments, critically evaluate sources, and often find wiser people to talk to.

Enter AI. The hype was sudden and dazzling: instant feedback, customised learning, and a new reliance on technology in the classroom from younger ages. Suddenly, platforms like Duolingo and Education Perfect are suggesting, nudging, correcting, encouraging. Large language models are providing answers and laying out a game plan. For teachers, AI is a great sidekick, diagnosing gaps, offering suggestions, and helping balance out the lack of resources that is so often a struggle. For students, it provides a helpful framework and nudge in the right direction. For a while.

It didn’t take long for something to shift, though. Teachers and tutors have started noticing some interesting patterns. Essays with identical structures, or quotes that are not from the right text. Paragraphs that go from a c-grade to an a-grade… in under an hour. Creative writing pieces with all the soul and bite of skim milk. Maths homework? Click for a solution. Science report? ChatGPT can summarise the findings. Friendship woes? Why not ask the machine for life advice? As one of my fellow tutors observed, its easier to check for plagiarism between students when they all seem to be submitting variations on the same thing. The more students depend on the bots, the more they avoid the bruises of actual reasoning, the discomfort of being contradicted, and the high of a creative breakthrough. Instead of experimenting and learning from mistakes, they reach for certainty. And that’s a problem.

This is where the dumbing-down effect begins to bite. Sure, AI is fast, shine, and doesn’t complain when you have to keep asking it the same thing time and time again. But when answer are just a click or quickly timed prompt away, the struggle disappears. The messy wrestling that’s central to forming and maintaining those critical thinking skills simply disappears. Its like eating exclusively chicken nuggets: satisfying for a while, but soon you’ll realise you’re missing the essential nutrients of vegetables.

What worries me most, though, is not just the lack of original ideas (although that is definitely a big one), but the decline in persistence. Critical thinking is powered by failure, and if every challenge becomes a quick fix, they become waiters for the machine. They’re less ready and willing to collaborate, argue, revise, try, fail, and try again. When that happens, critical thinking skills aren’t being learnt, which means they start to disappear.

THAT is one of the biggest threats AI, especially large language models, poses in our classrooms.

Of course, AI doesn’t spell doom. Using these tools as coaches, not crutches, has the potential to seriously boost the development of critical thinking! Imagine students critiquing bot-generated essays and adding their own voice, or teachers using AI to highlight bias and test lesson plans before putting them into the classroom. That’s not the norm. Too often, AI is a substitute for struggle, removing the opportunity to flex those creative and analytical muscles.

The dumbing-down effect isn’t about the technology itself – that much is clear to me. Its about abandoning the messy human experiences that actually grow our minds. The danger of convenience is real, and overreliance on AI can flatten originality and shorten attention spans. The challenge now is to harness the strengths of AI without letting it snuff out the spark of human curiosity.

So what do we do in the age of AI? I don’t have the answer, because removing AI from our classrooms (or, more importantly, the lives of our students) is not going to happen, at least not any time soon. What I do know is we need to start teaching students what AI can and can’t do. Encourage scepticism, make space for collaboration and actual human debate, rebuild assessment so if values process (how did you get here?) not just the final answer.

Critical thinking has always been a journey, and AI doesn’t have to replace these human experiences; instead, it can become a tool that supports and enriches them. By guiding students to understand bot the strengths and limitations of AI, just like we do every other tool and source, we can foster a generation that uses these technologies thoughtfully, critically, and creatively. If we embrace this balance, there is a great hope that students will maintain and even elevate their critical thinking skills. They can become empowered thinkers, ready to navigate this ever-changing world with both wisdom and wonder.