The Google Chrome logo appears on the screen of a smartphone in Reno, United States, on December 6, 2024. (Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
“The temptation to cheat was suddenly just two clicks away.” Those are the words of Geoffrey Fowler, technology columnist at the Washington Post.
He was writing about Google’s introduction of “homework help.” Fowler reports that the innovation is a “button” on Chrome that “has been appearing automatically on the kinds of course websites used by the majority of American college students and many high-schoolers, too.” Translated, it makes it possible for students to “cheat” on homework and tests.
Fowler writes that educators he’s spoken with “are alarmed,” and Google has subsequently paused “homework help.” That’s too bad. Its advance could profoundly improve education.
How we know the above to be true can be found in the happy fact that more than a few educators “are alarmed.” Worried about what’s ahead is a constant for businesses of all stripes. As Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank once put it, “No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” Since there’s no standing still in business, the ones that remain open are constantly evolving to the betterment of the customer.
What’s true about business has too often not been true about education. And this is not a public versus private school dig as much as it’s a comment that whether public or private, it’s rare to see either kind go out of business based on a failure to evolve. If anything, age enhances school perception. Private schools in particular revel in how long they’ve been around, of how long they’ve been “shaping” the individuals who will allegedly create the future.
While profit-motivated commerce quite literally gains strength from weakness whereby the past is relentlessly replaced by new entrants creating an entirely different future, educational institutions yet again gain prestige from how much their ways are stuck in the past. With education, nostalgia for the ways of old sells. Something’s wrong with this picture, but the good news is that Google and others have the potential to profoundly change it.
With computers and internet ubiquitous in concert with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, so will grow the range of ways that students will possess to have their schoolwork done for them. Good. Actually, great. Think about work to understand why.
The relentless mechanization of it doesn’t shrink we human beings or make us lazy, rather it enhances our value on the job and to our employers precisely because it frees us up to do a great deal more. Learning is no different. Educational progress, like work progress, is a function of what we no longer need to know or do.
Put another perhaps more trite way, change is good. In all ways. And what’s good for students must be good for their instructors. Technology that enables cheating on tests and homework won’t put teachers into breadlines as much as it will force them to develop all new ways of instructing. Thinking about homework on its own, just because it’s always been the most disagreeable aspect of school doesn’t mean it always has to be.
The main thing is that good or even great is not enough. If education is as important as they say, then it’s important enough to be routinely disrupted. Google shouldn’t pause “homework help” simply because its healthy existence is the stuff of much better educational outcomes.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2025/09/22/googles-homework-help-could-profoundly-improve-education/
