A few months ago, my colleague Sam Schechner flew to Estonia in Northern Europe.
He was there to visit high schools.
A Spanish teacher let him sit in on the class.
He had set up the class in the computer lab, and he introduced me to the class and said I'd be observing.
And, you know, basically he showed them some sort of game-like activities
that he'd created with ChatGPT for them to practice their Spanish.
Sam, how did you find yourself in a classroom in Estonia?
Well, they are doing something that I thought was unusual, interesting, and a little bit scary.
They are giving every high school student in the country,
or at least to start with every 10th and 11th grader, their own chat GPT account.
Why?
Well, yeah, that's the funny part.
They're doing it because they're worried about the impact that AI could have on learning.
Estonia started thinking about the project in 2024 after one survey found that 90% of the country's
high school students were already using generative AI for learning.
They figured that not doing anything was the worst choice of all.
And so instead, they're launching a national experiment to figure out what the best thing is to do.
And I wanted to figure out if there's a way to...
I guess at a basic level,
if there's a way to keep learning in an age when machines can do your thinking for you.