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You guesssssssssss!

Guess who won the bamsa interdepartmental debate? Yes, your girl!

Omor I can't believe it, I was so excited ehen, like>>> I knew I could do it, but actually doing it? Mehn! I'm just grateful to God, to think that after hearing my opponents points I was hoping that lemme just least come second place, but the judge commended argument.

It felt like divine compensation for the Shitty week I've had. It meant so much to me for real, it's how I went from the girl that spent a whole day in bed crying over my phonelessness to the girl screaming and jumping on stage when she was declared first place.

It was grand and it was something I was actually passionate about, anyways, as my dearly beloved readers, lemme share with you my argument because why not:

Artificial intelligence in education: a tool for advancement or a threat to students' intellect?

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The difference between animals and humans is our ability to think. So when we hand students a machine that thinks for them, let’s be honest, are we advancing education, or burying intellect?

Good day moderator, panel of judges, timekeeper, and everyone present.

I am Favour Okwanyionu Oghenenyerovwo, from the Department of Medical Laboratory Science.

And I stand firmly to oppose the motion: “Artificial Intelligence in education: a tool for advancement or a threat to students’ intellect?”

Now, what is artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence in machines, enabling them to learn, reason, and perform tasks that normally require human thinking.

Did you see that? Perform tasks that require human thinking? It's giving we are outsourcing thinking, which brings me to my first point;

1. AI is killing critical thinking: 

Education is meant to train the brain to think, not to outsource thinking.

Is it really getting an education when students cannot think independently, without the urge to reach for their phones and ask an ai for literally everything? 

The moment you hand a student an AI, their brain relaxes. And like Larmark law of use and disuse suggests, guess what progressively declines when it's not often used? 

Every. Other. Muscle.

We don't give athletes wheelchairs and call it innovation. So why are we giving students answer machines and then call it a tool for advancement?

95% of college professors in a national survey released in 2026 said they fear student overreliance on AI is diminishing critical thinking. 

But go ahead, tell me those professors are wrong. Tell me the machines know better than the mentors. Tell me the algorithm has more insight into human development than the humans who dedicate their lives to it.

I'll wait.

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. "the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically." Intensively. As in,,, with effort. As in,,, with pain. As in,,, the kind of thinking that cannot be outsourced to a server farm in Silicon Valley

Here's a question did my opponents; You say AI is a tool. Wonderful. A hammer is also a tool, but we don't give students hammers and tell them they've learned carpentry. So let me ask you directly, when this AI does the thinking, the assignments, the reasoning, exactly whose intellect are we advancing?

2. The illusion of competence; Recent research shows that reliance on AI flattens or even reverses the classic Dunning-Kruger pattern. When people use tools like ChatGPT to solve problems, everyone, not just novices, begins to overestimate how well they understand what they think they know, because they trust the machine’s output without verifying it. 

AI makes students more confident in things they don’t actually understand.

It creates the illusion of competence..

In one study, 83% of students who used AI struggled to recall key information or explain it afterwards

3. My opponents are going to stand up and say: "But AI is the future. You can't stop progress."

But hear me out;

A mind that has been challenged, that has failed and recovered, that has argued with itself at 2am over an idea that mattered, that mind is dangerous. 

That is what education is supposed to produce, not a student who's good at prompting, rather a student who doesn't need to.

Now, let's come home and let's be real; Nigeria has over 200 million people and one of the youngest populations on earth. The economists call it a demographic dividend, the idea that all these young minds, if educated, could transform this continent. 

But a demographic dividend only pays out if the demographic can think.

Yet we are not producing thinkers. We are producing people who are very good at asking questions to a chatbot, a chatbot that does not know what it means to be Nigerian, does not know hunger, does not know ASUU strike, does not know what it cost to get into that classroom, and we call it progress?

What we need, what we have always needed are people who can sit with a hard problem, in the dark, with the light out, and think their way through it.

Education was supposed to build those people, don't let AI steal the only thing our parents bled to give us.

Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent wants you to believe that giving a student AI is like giving them a calculator. Fine. But tell me, outside these walls , when they are faced with real life challenges, the things no textbook predicted is there going to be a chatbot in the room? Or is it going to be that student, alone, with nothing but the

mind we either built or abandoned?

In conclusion, I genuinely hope you're convinced that no, ai isn't advancing intellect, it is eradicating it. Thank you.

Alright byeeeee.   

@favvy_Okwans🖤.