Institut auf dem Rosenberg in St Gallen, Switzerland.
Institut auf dem Rosenberg
At $162,500-a-year, Institut auf dem Rosenberg is “possibly” the world’s most expensive school.
The Swiss boarding school’s director told Insider it is embracing AI tech like ChatGPT and DALL-E.
She says banning ChatGPT is “mass hysteria,” and students need to be taught the ethics of AI.
While educators around the world ban ChatGPT, Institut auf dem Rosenberg – one of the world’s most expensive schools at $162,500 a year – is encouraging students to use AI tools.
The Swiss boarding school, which says it is “possibly” the world’s costliest, requires a non-refundable fee of over $1,000 just to apply. While oligarchs’ offspring and German billionaires are rumored to have attended, Rosenberg’s student-privacy rules means it neither confirms nor denies the names of alumni.
Anita Gademann, the school’s director and head of innovation, told Insider how she started preparing for AI five years ago, after reading Kai-Fu Lee’s “AI 2040: Ten Visions for Our Future.”
“We are very determined to ensure that whatever we teach our students is relevant for them – relevant for the world they’re going to go into in the future,” she says. “It would be hypocritical to say ‘Don’t use AI’ and then pretend that we’re going to send them ready for their lives as adults.”
Using ChatGPT and DALL·E in the classroom
Gademann says students are taught to use AI “as a tool,” and she’s particularly excited by text-to-image generators like DALL·E. Seventh-graders used it for a History project to visualize the Middle Ages, and the “discrepancies between nobility and peasants.” Another student used DALL·E to generate pictures in an essay about the role of women in the First World War.
But students are also “incredibly cautious” and “very critical” of ChatGPT, she says. In one economics lesson, they graded its answers. The AI didn’t score more than a C.
“I would say that if you’re getting C level answers from ChatGPT, you’re asking the wrong question,” Gademann adds. “My kids are learning to ask it specifically in such a way that the first answer is correct.”
Students also explore ethical questions, as well as the pros and cons of AI, like a September course called “The art of conflict.” They produced both a play and a law, around hypotheticals like “What happens if AI kills?” questioning whether the programmer or inventor would be responsible.
Rosenberg students met Boston Dynamics’ Spot.
Institut auf dem Rosenberg
‘Mass hysteria of censorship and banning’
Gademann says teachers know if a student has plagiarized an essay because they’re familiar with their writing styles and any shortcomings. Although this is more easily achieved at Rosenberg, which has a student-to-staff ratio of 2:1. “I’m not naive,” Gademann says. “I am fully aware of the fact that we are a very, very special school.”
But she adds: “I know the name and aim and objective of every single one of my 230 kids. I make it my business to know this.”
Gademann references a New York Times article which noted how 6,000 teachers from universities including Harvard and Yale had signed up to GPTZero, a program which can detect AI-generated text. Other universities revised plagiarism policies or completely banned ChatGPT.
She calls it a “mass hysteria of censorship and banning,” adding that it “shows us how behind we are as as a world” because her students already use AI every day.
“Can you imagine a scenario where we’re throwing millions and millions of dollars to find out if a student used a calculator in math homework in the ’80s?” Gademann asks. “It sounds bizarre, no?”
Insider previously reported that London’s $28,000-a-year Alleyn’s School is putting more emphasis on preparing for lessons instead of traditional homework amid the rise of ChatGPT. Gademann approves of this approach, saying: “I think education has to change in a way whereby the teacher and the student are working together towards something, versus being taught and then producing something in a silo.”
She explains how when she was younger, “the more languages you spoke and the more books you read, the cooler you were.” Now, she says, “knowledge is completely passé.”
“You have to teach skills, and you have to teach values and ethics.”