I like this article, but please allow me to share some constructive feedback: consider the possibility that certain observations that sound perfectly valid (like the one quoted below) have nevertheless been true for every generation (certainly mine) since pretty much forever:
"One thing I noticed about my friends in high school and college is that they were always half-assing assignments and quizzes so they could do something that they felt mattered."
You don't say? Of course some people might find that video games are the things that really mattered, but that may be a different topic.
I do appreciate the personal perspective provided here into a generation's experience with AI. But human nature, at least in my few decades of observing it, has actually remained fairly stable (both for better and for worse). Many of the complaints this article levels at education have also been around for, well, let's just say they've been around for a while.
So, I'm left thinking that if AI (or at least the infamous LLMs) had popped up at an earlier time in history, not much would've really been all that different.
I did a brief survey walking thru a major city during school hours. Funny, but I did not find a single person who had cut class to teach underprivileged children robotics or build their nonprofits. Their reasons were far less altruistic. One of us is on a different planet.
I like your essay, it clearly wasn't written by AI, I like the cut of your jib, you'd probably be my favorite student if I had you in my class (I teach high school history), but I detected a sour note or two, for your consideration:
Let's take a step back and consider the point of education. It seems that your view is that the point of education is to offer students the tools they need to pursue what they believe matters. I think that's part of it. But I think the larger part, the more important part, is to pull kids' heads out of their asses. This is difficult. It's typically way up there, even (arguably especially) for the smart ones. The key question to my mind, the key question for liberal arts education generally (if one believes in such a thing, as I do) is, what is the foundation upon which one decides what matters in the first place? Few such foundational commitments, even, let's say, religious ones or otherwise inherited ones or native ones, are beyond the realm of fruitful intellectual investigation via engagement with the great thinkers and writers of our time and all time, perhaps to strengthen or deepen one's convictions, perhaps to modify them, perhaps to change them entirely.
I don't know what your college classes were like, the ones you describe as so dispiriting, where you felt unchallenged and where you sense that your professors don't "believe their own bullshit anymore." I went to college in the late '90s and law school in the early aughts. I wasn't a teacher's pet, but I was the sort who generally liked his teachers (since even primary and secondary education) and profs and TAs. It's rare that I didn't, and the couple of times I had a strong sense of grievance, I must admit in retrospect that I was completely in the wrong. That goes even for the community college and teachers' college classes I took far more recently in order to get credentialed to change careers. There were some I recognized as, let's say, not very good at it, but the bottom line was that I always felt that I could make of the class basically what I wanted and that a failure to do so was mostly on me. I could choose to get into it or not. I pretty powerfully regret, in fact, choosing not to do that for subjects that I found interesting even then in the abstract but just couldn't be bothered with, even when I had at my disposal such brilliant minds, people whose books I now devour. What can I say? I was an idiot kid. I read your dismissal of a class in which you were reading Aristotle, and I think, gosh, yes, he was wrong about so much, but swimming in Greek waters can be so exhilarating just the same.
I can't know for sure, but did you ever suspect that maybe your profs seem jaded not because *they* don't believe their "bullshit," but rather because they've become cynical about their students and despair that they could ever convince them that the stuff they love isn't bullshit? Cause I gotta say, I know the feeling! They shouldn't succumb, of course. Enthusiasm for one's subject is rule 1 for a teacher of anything. But it's not always easy, especially when you see your students refuse, maybe "decline" is a nicer word, to engage, not because they're busy saving the world, which they're hardly ever doing if we're honest, but because, in any given moment, they'd rather not. That doesn't make them bad people. There's something else that feels more salient in their budding lives just then -- an age-old phenomenon, as a previous commenter suggested, and one I'm sympathetic with. But let's not kid ourselves about who's failing whom.
I detect in your essay a cry for greater accountability for students, real measures of learning. None of this grade your own work bullshit, for example. I'm similarly inclined, but I also detect sympathy for the specious idea that students feel that there are two standards, one for students, one for the real world, specious because, of course, the nature of the academic endeavor is academic -- to engage in an exercise of the mind as distinct from completing a product by whatever means. One might as well say that it's silly to run a marathon when you could just drive the distance. Why two sets of standards for runners and drivers?
I'm curious, what would you say to a college experience more like a typical law school one, at least the one I had. That is, one a bit like the classic movie depicting the 1L experience The Paper Chase, but less cruel. As in, you have reading, you have Socratic lectures where you are cold-called upon to address questions (the ideal Socratic lecture has the prof almost exclusively asking questions) and thus feel pressure not to make a fool of yourself in the lecture hall on any given day; some seminars as well; and a one-test evaluation -- in a Blue Book or browser-locked digital Blue Book, where you basically have to write a paper or a set of essays then and there that shows that you know your shit.
This would take time away from saving the world, it would place high demands on students in subjects that are not their top priority, but it would be real, as in intellectually real, as in it would show what your mind can produce on its own with only, say, the books or readings at your disposal. Whaddya think?
I think your point is absolutely fair, and as to your question, I think something like 1L is better than what we're doing now, but not the ideal. I do think if it were like 1L more people would realize college isn't for them—and that would be good. Some people should be in academia and others should start a business or go to trade school, and adding rigor to undergrad would help differentiate.
As for what is ideal, it didn't make it into this essay (perhaps it should have) but I actually had an amazing highschool education with project-based learning. We wrote and filmed cancer PSAs, wrote and illustrated children's story books and though we didn't take many exams we frequently had high test scores compared to the rest of the state because we learned to actually think instead of read textbooks. I didn't like all the projects; they didn't all feel valuable, and I worked with people I didn't always like, but learning how to video edit because I had a client? That's realistic. I'd perfer a rounded liberal arts education to look something like that and then get more specific and have more papers and exams once someone specializes into law, medicine, etc.
I hope it's obvious I'm not saying every student is trying to save the world (though many of my friends are trying), but that many students want to. Of course, many appear lazy, uninterested and directionless—they aren't holding up their end of the bargain. We're also seeing a rise in mental health issues, distractiability, and lack of mentorship in this generation. It would be unreasonable to expect a professor to chase down every lazy student in their 500 person lecture to individually inspire them, but there are other options. As the experienced adults in the room, I want the professors to offer some professional guidance, and if they're class is too big they could instead make them form groups and recruit a client at the university to design a product for. Not only can that not be done with AI, but it exposes them to a host of new skills they may love or hate—if they love skills like memorization, logic, persuasion, attention to detail, maybe they find they want to go the rigorous 1L route, which is more specific to the pressures a lawyer will face (I don't think law-school style rigor is all that useful for someone looking to be an elementary teacher).
If you learned early that success in life comes from setting your own goals and pursuing them relentlessly, then you do have a good education. Throughout our lives we are taught to achieve other people’s goals. After a life of “quiet desperation” it dawns on them too late that working for the aspirations of others was a waste of their lives.
I like this article, but please allow me to share some constructive feedback: consider the possibility that certain observations that sound perfectly valid (like the one quoted below) have nevertheless been true for every generation (certainly mine) since pretty much forever:
"One thing I noticed about my friends in high school and college is that they were always half-assing assignments and quizzes so they could do something that they felt mattered."
You don't say? Of course some people might find that video games are the things that really mattered, but that may be a different topic.
I do appreciate the personal perspective provided here into a generation's experience with AI. But human nature, at least in my few decades of observing it, has actually remained fairly stable (both for better and for worse). Many of the complaints this article levels at education have also been around for, well, let's just say they've been around for a while.
So, I'm left thinking that if AI (or at least the infamous LLMs) had popped up at an earlier time in history, not much would've really been all that different.
I did a brief survey walking thru a major city during school hours. Funny, but I did not find a single person who had cut class to teach underprivileged children robotics or build their nonprofits. Their reasons were far less altruistic. One of us is on a different planet.
I like your essay, it clearly wasn't written by AI, I like the cut of your jib, you'd probably be my favorite student if I had you in my class (I teach high school history), but I detected a sour note or two, for your consideration:
Let's take a step back and consider the point of education. It seems that your view is that the point of education is to offer students the tools they need to pursue what they believe matters. I think that's part of it. But I think the larger part, the more important part, is to pull kids' heads out of their asses. This is difficult. It's typically way up there, even (arguably especially) for the smart ones. The key question to my mind, the key question for liberal arts education generally (if one believes in such a thing, as I do) is, what is the foundation upon which one decides what matters in the first place? Few such foundational commitments, even, let's say, religious ones or otherwise inherited ones or native ones, are beyond the realm of fruitful intellectual investigation via engagement with the great thinkers and writers of our time and all time, perhaps to strengthen or deepen one's convictions, perhaps to modify them, perhaps to change them entirely.
I don't know what your college classes were like, the ones you describe as so dispiriting, where you felt unchallenged and where you sense that your professors don't "believe their own bullshit anymore." I went to college in the late '90s and law school in the early aughts. I wasn't a teacher's pet, but I was the sort who generally liked his teachers (since even primary and secondary education) and profs and TAs. It's rare that I didn't, and the couple of times I had a strong sense of grievance, I must admit in retrospect that I was completely in the wrong. That goes even for the community college and teachers' college classes I took far more recently in order to get credentialed to change careers. There were some I recognized as, let's say, not very good at it, but the bottom line was that I always felt that I could make of the class basically what I wanted and that a failure to do so was mostly on me. I could choose to get into it or not. I pretty powerfully regret, in fact, choosing not to do that for subjects that I found interesting even then in the abstract but just couldn't be bothered with, even when I had at my disposal such brilliant minds, people whose books I now devour. What can I say? I was an idiot kid. I read your dismissal of a class in which you were reading Aristotle, and I think, gosh, yes, he was wrong about so much, but swimming in Greek waters can be so exhilarating just the same.
I can't know for sure, but did you ever suspect that maybe your profs seem jaded not because *they* don't believe their "bullshit," but rather because they've become cynical about their students and despair that they could ever convince them that the stuff they love isn't bullshit? Cause I gotta say, I know the feeling! They shouldn't succumb, of course. Enthusiasm for one's subject is rule 1 for a teacher of anything. But it's not always easy, especially when you see your students refuse, maybe "decline" is a nicer word, to engage, not because they're busy saving the world, which they're hardly ever doing if we're honest, but because, in any given moment, they'd rather not. That doesn't make them bad people. There's something else that feels more salient in their budding lives just then -- an age-old phenomenon, as a previous commenter suggested, and one I'm sympathetic with. But let's not kid ourselves about who's failing whom.
I detect in your essay a cry for greater accountability for students, real measures of learning. None of this grade your own work bullshit, for example. I'm similarly inclined, but I also detect sympathy for the specious idea that students feel that there are two standards, one for students, one for the real world, specious because, of course, the nature of the academic endeavor is academic -- to engage in an exercise of the mind as distinct from completing a product by whatever means. One might as well say that it's silly to run a marathon when you could just drive the distance. Why two sets of standards for runners and drivers?
I'm curious, what would you say to a college experience more like a typical law school one, at least the one I had. That is, one a bit like the classic movie depicting the 1L experience The Paper Chase, but less cruel. As in, you have reading, you have Socratic lectures where you are cold-called upon to address questions (the ideal Socratic lecture has the prof almost exclusively asking questions) and thus feel pressure not to make a fool of yourself in the lecture hall on any given day; some seminars as well; and a one-test evaluation -- in a Blue Book or browser-locked digital Blue Book, where you basically have to write a paper or a set of essays then and there that shows that you know your shit.
This would take time away from saving the world, it would place high demands on students in subjects that are not their top priority, but it would be real, as in intellectually real, as in it would show what your mind can produce on its own with only, say, the books or readings at your disposal. Whaddya think?
I think your point is absolutely fair, and as to your question, I think something like 1L is better than what we're doing now, but not the ideal. I do think if it were like 1L more people would realize college isn't for them—and that would be good. Some people should be in academia and others should start a business or go to trade school, and adding rigor to undergrad would help differentiate.
As for what is ideal, it didn't make it into this essay (perhaps it should have) but I actually had an amazing highschool education with project-based learning. We wrote and filmed cancer PSAs, wrote and illustrated children's story books and though we didn't take many exams we frequently had high test scores compared to the rest of the state because we learned to actually think instead of read textbooks. I didn't like all the projects; they didn't all feel valuable, and I worked with people I didn't always like, but learning how to video edit because I had a client? That's realistic. I'd perfer a rounded liberal arts education to look something like that and then get more specific and have more papers and exams once someone specializes into law, medicine, etc.
I hope it's obvious I'm not saying every student is trying to save the world (though many of my friends are trying), but that many students want to. Of course, many appear lazy, uninterested and directionless—they aren't holding up their end of the bargain. We're also seeing a rise in mental health issues, distractiability, and lack of mentorship in this generation. It would be unreasonable to expect a professor to chase down every lazy student in their 500 person lecture to individually inspire them, but there are other options. As the experienced adults in the room, I want the professors to offer some professional guidance, and if they're class is too big they could instead make them form groups and recruit a client at the university to design a product for. Not only can that not be done with AI, but it exposes them to a host of new skills they may love or hate—if they love skills like memorization, logic, persuasion, attention to detail, maybe they find they want to go the rigorous 1L route, which is more specific to the pressures a lawyer will face (I don't think law-school style rigor is all that useful for someone looking to be an elementary teacher).
If you learned early that success in life comes from setting your own goals and pursuing them relentlessly, then you do have a good education. Throughout our lives we are taught to achieve other people’s goals. After a life of “quiet desperation” it dawns on them too late that working for the aspirations of others was a waste of their lives.