In a public elementary school in Chuncheon, about 50 miles east of Seoul, a teacher asked students whether the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is human, NPR reported.
"I think we can call it a human being with no soul," student Ma Yeonwoo said. The Toegye school has adopted the Great Books model used by St. John's College, which has campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The discussion then shifted to whether artificial intelligence is human. "No," Ma said, because humans created AI, and although it is intelligent, it "has no creativity."
In the Great Books model, teachers do not lecture, they only guide discussions. There are no majors or elective courses at the college level of the program. Students do not seek answers from outside sources such as the internet and rely only on their readings, their own reasoning and class discussions with their peers. That suits Ma, who told NPR he enjoys debating with classmates: "If only the teacher talks we can have one idea, but if we all debate together, like, we can get many ideas together."
A reading slump, weekly chatbots, and a city hall bet
The experiment addresses several trends. International tests such as PISA have shown a post-COVID drop in South Korean reading skills, after decades in which South Korean and other East Asian students outperformed their American counterparts. South Korea has also rapidly adopted AI in education. Fifty-one percent of South Korean students say they use AI chatbots to study at least once a week, according to OECD figures cited by NPR. Students also face intense competition to pass college entrance exams, which piles pressure on them down to the pre-K level and prompts many families to send children to cram schools, or to foreign schools to escape the system.
"We all feel that this system leaves students with no time to read and think, because they're too busy memorizing facts to pass tests," said Lee Yonghwa, a professor of English language and literature at Incheon National University, where he co-founded South Korea's first Great Books program in 2019. Now, he said, "Korean students are even losing their old capacity to memorize facts because they collect facts and ideas mainly from A.I." If they cannot reason independently, he added, they cannot judge the quality of the results AI generates for them.
Chuncheon Mayor Yook Dong-han told NPR that, as someone who went through the system, he "felt those limitations keenly" and wanted to introduce a different educational philosophy to the city. Chuncheon's government established an academic partnership with St. John's College last year. There are now 120 college students and some 770 younger students taking the program in South Korea, and 40 teachers in training, according to Lee. Students read Aristotle, Shakespeare, Euclid, and Korean authors including Nobel laureate Han Kang. In one Chuncheon high school, students read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail and, Lee said, connected it to 2024, when citizens and lawmakers defeated former President Yoon Suk Yeol's attempt to put South Korea under martial law.
Yook called the still-young program a "small but revolutionary achievement." St. John's College President J. Walter Sterling wrote last year that "each seminar table really becomes a miniature republic, where ideas clash but people cooperate." NPR's account is not that AI has been banished from Korean classrooms. It is that one city is trying to teach students how to argue about a book without asking a chatbot first.