Wait a Minute! Is this 1966 or 2025?
“It is clear the world is going to be a different place. But it is not easy to discern in what ways the differences will manifest.”
That sounds as if it could have been written in June of 2025 about the use of artificial intelligence in schools. But it was written in December of 1966 by Loomis Chaffee science teacher Keith Palmer to Headmaster Fred Torrey.
“I am anxious to write you a note on our visit a short time ago to a demonstration in Springfield of computer use in schools,” Keith wrote. “The situation is one in which the school is linked to a large computer by means of the telephone company’s Dataphone system. I must say at the start that the computer is an intellectual tool so versatile and powerful as to presently defy our imagination. My feelings last week were, I suppose, akin to those of a man seeing the first car on the road.”
He went on to write that line about how the world will become a different place. Loomis Chaffee jumped into that world in 1967 when it was one of 18 schools to participate in an innovative Dartmouth College project integrating computer use into secondary schools. Students connected to a mainframe computer at Dartmouth via telephone. The intention of the project was to get students to think creatively through the use of computers.
Keith went on in his letter to Fred to write about the potential benefits of the computer in education: “I’m sure you can see that the matching of the computer’s potential with the human brain gives rise to a situation of enormous interest, comparable perhaps to the harnessing of the motor to the wheel, or nuclear reactions to heat generation.”
He closed the letter: “... May I reiterate that it is hard to see the effect of computers on our society and our educational system probably because they will be so big and so radical. One of the main reasons for this is that so many people will learn to use them. The results of mating this fantastic tool with so many human imaginations cannot be conjectured.”
Now, of course, about 60 years later the world is grappling with another “fantastic tool” — if, of course, it is used in the right way. As the school did in the late ’60s, Loomis Chaffee is trying to stay ahead of the game. On June 3, Loomis held its third Generative Artificial Intelligence Symposium. The “New Paths Forward Symposium: AI, Humanity, and the Next Era of Education” brought about 200 people from more than 30 schools and offered 28 workshops in an event sponsored by the Pearse Hub for Innovation and the Henry R. Kravis ’63 Center for Excellence in Teaching.
An introductory message to the symposium on the LC website said: “An uncomfortable truth is emerging within classrooms: AI technologies prompt us to question the value and structural integrity of many of our common programs and practices. From the tangible (out-of-class writing assignments, reading comprehension, and core research skills) to the intangible (academic traits like resilience, reasoning, and critical thinking), AI has made operating in a business-as-usual mode shortsighted or impossible.”
Academic Technology Coordinator Matt Johnson helped put the conference together and has helped lead Loomis into this new era. He’s had his moments “akin to those of a man seeing the first car on the road.”
“My feelings when I first heard of [AI] capabilities and explored it were apprehension, amazement, confusion. I had been playing around with OpenAI’s models … and had been planning on trying to write a program for my students to ‘chat’ with an AI as part of a unit on AI in an English class I had been teaching. But before I could get to work on that, ChatGPT was released — I was blown away at the jump in capabilities from previous models. It was coherent, persistent, uncanny.”
Just as Keith Palmer felt in 1966, many today might feel that we are again seeing that first car on the road, yet not knowing all the issues that will arise.
A July 1968 story in The Log said every mathematics student at Loomis Chaffee was introduced “during the last school year to the marvels of the computer, not only for work but for fun and games as well.”
The computer teletype was situated in Founders Hall and connected to the General Electric 635 machine at Dartmouth. “Dartmouth and GE,” noted The Log article, “claim a world’s record for simultaneous sharing of the one mechanical brain which has 13 terminals, of which Loomis is one. Other terminals are in 20 secondary schools and nine colleges, with many of the schools and colleges having more than one.”
All of the Loomis geometry students were asked to program the computer to find Pythagorean Triples and print them in columns. And there was time for fun, too. “During the World Series,” noted a 1968 Loomis Bulletin article, “a crowd of boys clustered about the teletype and used it to get a fairly accurate idea of what each batter and pitcher was likely to do next. The machine was fed information on batting averages and earned run averages and used this information to come up with predictions.”
Today, Major League Baseball teams use AI in various ways. A Forbes story in 2024 explored its applications for player development, injury prevention, scouting, and enhancing the fan experience.
Embracing computers surely enhanced the Loomis Chaffee student experience, and by 1970 the school was in the third year of the Dartmouth program. All students were required to write at least two programs in the programming language BASIC for each course in mathematics that they took. There also was a computer club. But as Loomis Chaffee entered the 1970s, the cost of renting the Dartmouth terminal increased, so the school purchased its own computer, a Digital Equipment corporation 12-bit microcomputer called the PDP-8. “At the time,” noted an article in a book about the history of the school at its Centennial, “a school actually owning its own computer was revolutionary.”
That General Electric 365 at Dartmouth was a behemoth: about 21 feet wide by 13 feet tall and 5 feet deep. Now we carry laptops and cell phones with many times more computing power.
AI clearly is not going away, yet who knows exactly where it will take us? Matt is at the forefront of that discovery process at Loomis.
“I guess in one sense I want to push back a bit against the phrase ‘lean hard into AI’ — I don’t think that we necessarily should do that,” Matt said. “What we do need to do is to lean hard into imagining a world where AI is more pervasive and then work backwards to think about the ways in which it ought to inform how schools operate. This AI-pervasive world is not inevitable, nor can we fully know what it will look like. But if we’ve managed to learn anything from previous technological changes [the first computers, the internet, social media, etc.], then we would be wise to practice some degree of discernment about the ways in which these tools can be used effectively.”
Matt said figuring out best practices “should happen collaboratively, openly, and honestly,” which he noted was the intent behind the symposium. “One big change from the early computing revolution to today is that we actually understand much more about how the brain, and particularly the adolescent brain, works. We know much more about the science of learning and can use that to think critically about whether a given use is appropriate for students.”
Still, technology moves quickly, which raises concerns “for our students about how to engage in a rapidly changing world,” he said.
“Our mission and values guide us here,” Matt said, “and beg more questions for the purpose and role of schools in such a world: How do we teach students about how these technologies came to be? Who do they benefit? Who do they harm? What does it mean to use these tools effectively? Ethically? How will these tools impact the way our students live and work? Perhaps the answers to those questions turn out to be smaller in scope than they feel like they could be right now. I suspect that’s not the case. The challenge in front of us is to keep asking the questions and to continue to grow and change in alignment with our values.”