Curious Cardinals CEO on AI in education: We need to teach kids how to thoughtfully use AI

0:00 mentorship platform uh Curious Cardinals was founded during the pandemic back in 2020 and now serves more than a thousand students every week with 700 mentors across the country. You know, we have a program, but we have a conversation on this program a lot about students and what they need to learn in the day and age of AI and what we should all be majoring in and everything else. And joining us to have a discussion about that, the skills that actually uh folks need to have that are actually in demand uh now that artificial intelligence seems to be making a big way into our society. Audrey Wish is co-founder and CEO of Curious Cardinals. Want to thank you for joining us this morning. Help us with this cuz everybody uh you know, we all have kids. We're all trying to figure out what's supposed to happen and if Chat GPT is going to be smarter than all of us how this is all supposed to

0:46 work. Well, thank you so much Andrew for having me here today and great question to start with. Let me start here which is Albert Einstein in a pre-digital age said don't memorize what you can already look up. Yet we are in an era where you can access any piece of information at your fingertips and we still teach kids to absorb and regurgitate what they read in a textbook. So, working with thousands of young people K through 12 to college, I am AI optimistic because I believe this is a call to action to raise the bar for how we cultivate critical thinking and problem solving, research and questioning, storytelling, and frankly, most important of all, the

1:32 ability to adapt and learn because we know that that is not going anywhere. Audrey, but let me ask you a question about that Einstein quote because here's the thing. part of uh reasoning and thinking and being able to make an argument at some level requires knowing information that you can be connecting dots between. And I fear that if we're not supposed to actually know the underlying information, we're not supposed to memorize that at all. It's very hard to actually be proficient being more than proficient being able to to make that argument about that information. Yeah. No, no, I absolutely agree with you. It's not that that foundational base level knowledge needs to go

2:17 anywhere. Um it's more AI necessitates that we raise the bar. And so I think the real shift is so many students are passive consumers doom scrolling on Tik Tok, checking the boxes, going through the motions, joining generic extracurriculars like Mod UN or robotics, not because they're actually interested in them, but because they think they have to. And what I encourage parents to think about this back to school season is how can you empower your kid to be an active agent of the change they want to see in the world, an active engager in their learning and go from again just going through the motions, checking the boxes to engaging engaging with critical thinking, researching, communication, collaboration. So that's the big shift.

3:03 What does that mean in a day and age where, you know, a kid goes to school, they've got homework, they've got sports, they got this and that, and they say to themselves, you know, this project would take me two hours if I actually did it the old way. This project could take me about 20 minutes if I did it the new way, but I may not learn as much in the new way. Or are you suggesting you think that they can learn just as much? That is the misunderstanding. AI is a tool to amplify, not replace. And I think so many people are misconstruing AI as something that kids are using to cheat and to write the essay instead of them. We need to teach kids how to thoughtfully use AI. If we are not teaching kids how to use AI to solve real problems, so many kids struggle

3:48 with executive function and study skills. AI can be a tool rather than to cut corners in their learning to help amplify and build those skills. So this Sunday we hosted a timeless skills in an AI era pitch competition. We had tons of kids apply. We chose 12 finalist who epitomized the timeless skills in an AI era. We had everyone from an incoming freshman at Harvard to a third grader Arman. This third grade boy invented a copper soap that never expires and doesn't require water. He was conducting science experiments in his room, working with his Stamford mentor the past year. And at the end, he said, "Thank you to my parents, my mentor, and Chhat GPT." This is not a boy who was having Chap GPT do the research for him. He was

4:35 conducting science experiments in his living room, critical thinking, problem solving. He used AI as an accelerant, not to cut corners. And that's the core difference we need to teach