Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools ? - A calculator with on the left with a green checkmark on its top, a sign with "LLMs" with a ban marking on the right, and a sign with the following text at the center: "Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools?"

I went through my entire childhood without using a calculator at school. That might sound like a gentle brag, but I assure you it is not. Why? The real reason was that the schooling system that I studied in had a popular rule for examinations:

“No calculators of any means allowed!”

When a student was spotted with a calculator, fellow students and teachers treated that student as if he or she had committed a grave crime. Now, you might be thinking something along these lines:

“Calculators were not allowed many years ago. So what? Those times are long gone. Why is this relevant now?”

If this thought indeed crossed your mind, I am here to argue that this problem is still relevant for our society and education. The calculator problem is still very much around; it is just that the word “calculator” is getting replaced by “Large Language Models (LLMs)”.

So, what now? This is basically the topic that I plan to wrestle with in this essay. Before we get to the educational challenge posed by LLMs though, let me linger on calculators for a bit more. Surely, there are valuable lessons we can learn from our own past, right?

Was It Helpful to Ban Calculators at School?

To be frank, that is a hard “no” for me personally. The trouble is that most of the other kids in my school and I wrote down the mathematical computations on a piece of paper or notebook and computed the output manually using written algorithms.

Fast forward to today, this is a skill that I almost never use. Actually, the “almost” is barely hanging in there to cover the chance that I might use it in the future (I have not used it once in the past five years).

A skill that I do use a lot in day-to-day life is mental computation. Banning calculators during my school years did not sharpen this skill, as I almost always preferred writing out my computations on a piece of paper (as did most of my school peers).

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How, then, did I get better at carrying out mental computations? Well, I had to unlearn most of the baggage that I learnt at school and relearn more suitable techniques for mental computation as an adult.

To make matters worse, I feel that I might have developed faster if I had access to calculators earlier. One feature quality of mine through the years has been my affinity for electrical and electronic devices — which mostly involves messing about and hacking the capabilities of a device to learn what is possible and what is not.

But What about Calculus and Algebra? And Matrices?

So far, I have been using the term “calculator” as a broad term (or as a super-set). The truth is there are many types of calculators.

The first time I was allowed to use a calculator was at the university. And these were not just any run-of-the-mill calculators; they were the super-cool Casio FX/MX-series calculators that could do wizardry like solving algebraic equation systems, perform calculus operations, multiply matrices, etc.

Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools? — A cartoon calculator with a green checkmark on top of it.
The calculator problem — Illustrative art created by the author

One could argue that if young school students had access to such calculators, they might never learn the fundamentals of algebra, calculus, matrix multiplication, etc.

While this might be true in some sense, I would argue that a scientific calculator (the fancy name for calculators that can do wizardry) would not hinder a student from learning the basics. Why? Firstly, without learning what a limit is, a student would not make much sense of the calculator’s functionality.

But let us say that a student understands the basics and chooses to “misuse” the calculator to obtain results faster for homework problems. Students (children in general, really) are remarkably good at seeking shortcuts, and this, in my humble opinion, is something that needs to be encouraged, and not discouraged.

If a student can find a shortcut to a problem, then I would say that it is the problem that needs working, not the student.

Times change. In the present day, I am working with mathematical models day in and day out. All of the calculus that I currently perform is using calculus libraries (a programmer’s calculator, if you will). I am constantly looking for faster and more efficient ways of solving problems — this is something I seek, not run away from.

All of this makes me wonder. What are we really protecting school students against by banning calculators?

Ban LLMs at Schools! Or Just Don’t?

Almost all of the points that I just covered for calculators hold true for LLMs as well, except for the fact that LLMs are multi-dimensional calculators. Their area of application goes beyond just mathematics. All of a sudden, we see students trying to use LLMs to solve their problems in all subjects across the board.

Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools? — A cartoon LLM sign with a ban sign laid on top of it.
The LLM problem — Illustrative art created by the author

Unlike calculators, however, LLMs can lead to “wrong” or “inaccurate” results in many different ways. This makes this issue certainly challenging. But if there is anything that we could learn from the calculator problem of the past, it is that banning technology use in schools/universities is not the way forward.

Whether we like it or not, these technologies are central to the future. If anything needs changing, it is the curriculum and the teaching/schooling system that needs to adapt to the times.

But Won’t Kids Just Get Dumber?

Well, not necessarily. When I was a child, I remember that my father had the nook and corner of the city ingrained into his memory. He just knew how to get to any given location quickly.

Fast forward to my time, and I did not have a clue. By then, GPS-based digital map technology and path-finding algorithms had advanced to such an extent, that I could just “rely” on these technologies to get to my target destination quickly.

Does this mean that I am dumber than my father? If you put each of us to test on who gets to the target destination the fastest without any aid, then I am definitely “dumber” than my father. But that is just one side of the story, right?

Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools ? — A calculator with on the left with a green checkmark on its top, a sign with “LLMs” with a ban marking on the right, and a sign with the following text at the center: “Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools?”
Is it correct to ban LLMs in schools ?— Illustrative art created by the author

Now that I don’t have to allocate much of my memory and attention to resolving the most optimal route to the destination, I can focus on other things that I deem important, like planning events before and after travel, for instance.

This, in essence, is what technological progress does. It abstracts away complex processes which took our forefathers their entire lifetimes to master, and transforms them into minutes or seconds for us. We, in turn, use and develop these technologies further, which future generations will base their lives upon.

Banning LLMs or calculators is highly unlikely to make school students dumber. It is time to look at the world with more optimism and less fear.

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