After some time (before smartphones) away from the classroom, a couple of years ago I was asked to teach first-year composition at a local small liberal-arts university and my experience led me to the same conclusion you've come to: there are structural problems that have created an educational environment in which AI is like gas added to a fire (or maybe like acid added to stone). My response has been to experiment with many of the same strategies you mention, including encouraging skepticism about grades and the grading process. The current hold of the transactional mindset may be well illustrated by the remarks of a student in response to my discussion of grading: "Professor Wiley, you might not like grades, but we students do."
Of course the transactional mindset is nothing new. It was well in place when I started teaching in the mid 1980s and has complex origins that aren't strictly speaking technological in origin and need broader discussion outside current "AI" debates. The blindness of academic leadership to the structural issues and the reluctance to discuss them are very frustrating and bode ill for the future of higher ed.
I can suggest three readings for those interested.
First, "What are You Going to Do With That?: The Future of College in the Asset Economy" (Harper's Magazine 9/24) by Erik Baker, an instructor at Harvard who addresses the history of the transactional mindset and where it may lead.
Second, "The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School" by Neil Postman (Vintage, 1995) that warns about the problems of what Postman calls "The God of Economic Utility" as the core purpose of education. He proposes some interesting alternative purposes/gods that are provocative.
Third, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" (Delta, 1969) by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner is still well worth reading.
I’m also letting students design their own tracks for AI-free and AI-friendly assignments, though I give them a chance to take the middle ground a bit more and pivot throughout the semester if they want.
I had a long talk with a friend about this yesterday. I'm a sociologist (though have been away from academia "doing life" for almost a decade now) who's thought a lot about the question of "what is education FOR?" I'm also about to become a homeschooling mom. I think the question of what we expect students to get out of college is so crucial to this whole conversation. I said to my friend yesterday that I wonder if we're going to move back towards a different kind of credentialism, where there's one type of education necessary for white collar jobs (as most people would deem a bachelor's degree to be today) and another that is deemed to hew to the original liberal arts goal of going to college "to get an education." Even as I say or think the words I hear how elitist they sound!
Were I teaching undergrads right now I think my first approach would be to move towards much more engagement with the material in class in one way or another: more discussion, small group work, etc. I also love your dual stream "with AI/without AI" approach. It's a challenge for educators to consider what are we actually trying to teach our students and how can we change the way we do things so that those lessons are still instilled. Is being able to write a coherent essay still the best way to teach a kid how to think? I don't know the answer.
Congrats on going the homeschooling route, I have so much respect for parents who do so. I personally feel like writing will continue to be the best way to teach thinking, but don’t forget that we used to focus on speaking too. As a home educator you’ll have the luxury of time to ask your children to deliver answers orally. Maybe even oral exams? Just a thought.
Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic. My kids are still very young (8 and 5), so the question of how to assess their learning is very different from how I'd do it with undergrads. I love the idea of "narration"--asking kids to summarize what they read back to an adult--as a way to test comprehension. And as I consider, that could be something to use in a classroom, too! OK, who can give us a summary of what Marx is arguing in the passage y'all read for this week?
I hope you are considering Classical education. I’ve been in that world since 2003. The relationship model of education promulgated in this article is what we do everyday. Although a student will very occasionally use AI to cheat, overwhelming they recognize how stupid that is. They know the POINT is to learn, not get the grade.
This was so well put. I've seen 'the piece' floating around, and the 'everyone is doing it' narrative seems counterproductive at best, nihilistic at worst. Surveillance is the solution IF AND ONLY IF you plan on changing nothing else... but changing nothing else is woefully inadequate to the challenge of making education meaningful (per your last post). Looking forward to sharing this with others.
Why do you think taxpayers and parents who pay tuition are going to indefinitely maintain a broken system of higher education until students begin to understand the value of the work and actually want to do it? The trend lines are all moving in the opposite direction.
I'm also curious about your stand against transactional relationships in education. Most students' lives off campus are dominated by transactional relationships. They cannot opt out of the market. Now I agree that we should resist the urge to monetize every student-teacher interaction, but saying education should not be transactional does not live in the real world. Such a bubble of pure academic thought cannot be maintained, especially in the world where everyone is on their phones 24/7.
One very simple step, which would cost no money, and probably save money: Make school optional at ALL ages. If a family doesn't want to send the kid to school, they don't go.
Schools and teachers should only be instructing kids that want to be there and choose to be there. Any kid that hates school should disenroll. No questions asked.
Two things on this. The first being, that doesn’t solve the students who show up because a degree is a means to a good job, which seems like the largest problem. Second, do you want to create an illiterate under class and, if not, how would you avoid it once school is optional, particularly for children from abusive homes?
This is such a complicated question. I've been spending a lot of time in self-directed education circles these days, where there's a huge emphasis on the fact that kids are born wanting to learn and will learn what they need for the things they care about--which in our society pretty much requires acquiring basic literacy and numeracy, and then specializing from there--but it's also true that school is a safe haven for so many kids for whom home isn't a safe place. And a childcare resource for so many families. And and and.
And then the "only people who want to go to college should go" runs into the credentialism problem, as you say. Seems like fixing it requires some large-scale retooling of what's required to get different kinds of jobs; if the goal is that someone signs a piece of paper saying that you've gotten a basic education, what should that basic education consist of? And why does it matter to an employer that you have it?
What if we want everyone to be a proficient ballet dancer? Do we make ballet dancing mandatory?
If we made ballet dancing mandatory, would the average ability levels of ballet dancers go up, or down?
It would go down, of course.
And the talented ballet dancers would live in a world where every context involving ballet dancers is designed and tailored for talentless dancers. That's not a good outcome.
We have to accept the fact that we cannot control whether people learn. Kids and families will make their own decisions.
Yep. And that's true in the current system and has been for a long time--no one advocating self-directed education would say otherwise.
I was more thinking about the many OTHER functions that primary & secondary school serve in our society that would need to be outsourced in some other way instead if schooling were made optional.
That's a great question, and I don't know the answer, but I would suggest that school should never have taken on those other functions.
One option is to just let the students go, and see where the chips fall. We should consider lowering the age of employment for certain kinds of jobs. A fifteen year old should be allowed to find a job.
This seems harsh, but it is better than forcing all the smart and motivated students to share classrooms and hallways with totally unmotivated students.
Honest question: where were all the teachers when the internet pornographers came after your students (the target audience make no mistake) 20 years ago? And every day since ? MIA. Regaining credibility might begin with admitting you abandoned your students by your silence. The progressive brainwashing continues.
If the purpose is to teach writing, I can think of some things that AI can't help with (yet). I write two Substacks. One of them, "Ataraxia or Bust!," I suppose, could be filled with AI content (not that it would be the content I want, but it could pass as content that readers might expect). The other cannot be done by AI because AI doesn't know it. That one is "Nottingham Blog." It's about what's happening in a tiny rural New England town. AI can't even generate a useful summary of board meetings. I'm reminded here about Pirsig's advice about writing about a brick in the opera house. It's something so particular, so unique, that it may escape the "it has been said before"/"it can be said by AI" ditch.
After some time (before smartphones) away from the classroom, a couple of years ago I was asked to teach first-year composition at a local small liberal-arts university and my experience led me to the same conclusion you've come to: there are structural problems that have created an educational environment in which AI is like gas added to a fire (or maybe like acid added to stone). My response has been to experiment with many of the same strategies you mention, including encouraging skepticism about grades and the grading process. The current hold of the transactional mindset may be well illustrated by the remarks of a student in response to my discussion of grading: "Professor Wiley, you might not like grades, but we students do."
Of course the transactional mindset is nothing new. It was well in place when I started teaching in the mid 1980s and has complex origins that aren't strictly speaking technological in origin and need broader discussion outside current "AI" debates. The blindness of academic leadership to the structural issues and the reluctance to discuss them are very frustrating and bode ill for the future of higher ed.
I can suggest three readings for those interested.
First, "What are You Going to Do With That?: The Future of College in the Asset Economy" (Harper's Magazine 9/24) by Erik Baker, an instructor at Harvard who addresses the history of the transactional mindset and where it may lead.
Second, "The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School" by Neil Postman (Vintage, 1995) that warns about the problems of what Postman calls "The God of Economic Utility" as the core purpose of education. He proposes some interesting alternative purposes/gods that are provocative.
Third, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" (Delta, 1969) by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner is still well worth reading.
I love this breakdown and how empathetic it is.
I’m also letting students design their own tracks for AI-free and AI-friendly assignments, though I give them a chance to take the middle ground a bit more and pivot throughout the semester if they want.
I had a long talk with a friend about this yesterday. I'm a sociologist (though have been away from academia "doing life" for almost a decade now) who's thought a lot about the question of "what is education FOR?" I'm also about to become a homeschooling mom. I think the question of what we expect students to get out of college is so crucial to this whole conversation. I said to my friend yesterday that I wonder if we're going to move back towards a different kind of credentialism, where there's one type of education necessary for white collar jobs (as most people would deem a bachelor's degree to be today) and another that is deemed to hew to the original liberal arts goal of going to college "to get an education." Even as I say or think the words I hear how elitist they sound!
Were I teaching undergrads right now I think my first approach would be to move towards much more engagement with the material in class in one way or another: more discussion, small group work, etc. I also love your dual stream "with AI/without AI" approach. It's a challenge for educators to consider what are we actually trying to teach our students and how can we change the way we do things so that those lessons are still instilled. Is being able to write a coherent essay still the best way to teach a kid how to think? I don't know the answer.
Congrats on going the homeschooling route, I have so much respect for parents who do so. I personally feel like writing will continue to be the best way to teach thinking, but don’t forget that we used to focus on speaking too. As a home educator you’ll have the luxury of time to ask your children to deliver answers orally. Maybe even oral exams? Just a thought.
Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic. My kids are still very young (8 and 5), so the question of how to assess their learning is very different from how I'd do it with undergrads. I love the idea of "narration"--asking kids to summarize what they read back to an adult--as a way to test comprehension. And as I consider, that could be something to use in a classroom, too! OK, who can give us a summary of what Marx is arguing in the passage y'all read for this week?
I hope you are considering Classical education. I’ve been in that world since 2003. The relationship model of education promulgated in this article is what we do everyday. Although a student will very occasionally use AI to cheat, overwhelming they recognize how stupid that is. They know the POINT is to learn, not get the grade.
This was so well put. I've seen 'the piece' floating around, and the 'everyone is doing it' narrative seems counterproductive at best, nihilistic at worst. Surveillance is the solution IF AND ONLY IF you plan on changing nothing else... but changing nothing else is woefully inadequate to the challenge of making education meaningful (per your last post). Looking forward to sharing this with others.
Lots of good points & perspectives to consider on a perplexing challenge. Thanks!
Why do you think taxpayers and parents who pay tuition are going to indefinitely maintain a broken system of higher education until students begin to understand the value of the work and actually want to do it? The trend lines are all moving in the opposite direction.
I'm also curious about your stand against transactional relationships in education. Most students' lives off campus are dominated by transactional relationships. They cannot opt out of the market. Now I agree that we should resist the urge to monetize every student-teacher interaction, but saying education should not be transactional does not live in the real world. Such a bubble of pure academic thought cannot be maintained, especially in the world where everyone is on their phones 24/7.
One very simple step, which would cost no money, and probably save money: Make school optional at ALL ages. If a family doesn't want to send the kid to school, they don't go.
Schools and teachers should only be instructing kids that want to be there and choose to be there. Any kid that hates school should disenroll. No questions asked.
Two things on this. The first being, that doesn’t solve the students who show up because a degree is a means to a good job, which seems like the largest problem. Second, do you want to create an illiterate under class and, if not, how would you avoid it once school is optional, particularly for children from abusive homes?
"Do you want to create an illiterate under class"
We are already creating a class of semi-literates with diplomas.
We can only school the people who want to be schooled. If you don't want to be schooled, then youn can take your chances. Simple as that.
This is such a complicated question. I've been spending a lot of time in self-directed education circles these days, where there's a huge emphasis on the fact that kids are born wanting to learn and will learn what they need for the things they care about--which in our society pretty much requires acquiring basic literacy and numeracy, and then specializing from there--but it's also true that school is a safe haven for so many kids for whom home isn't a safe place. And a childcare resource for so many families. And and and.
And then the "only people who want to go to college should go" runs into the credentialism problem, as you say. Seems like fixing it requires some large-scale retooling of what's required to get different kinds of jobs; if the goal is that someone signs a piece of paper saying that you've gotten a basic education, what should that basic education consist of? And why does it matter to an employer that you have it?
It's really an easy question.
What if we want everyone to be a proficient ballet dancer? Do we make ballet dancing mandatory?
If we made ballet dancing mandatory, would the average ability levels of ballet dancers go up, or down?
It would go down, of course.
And the talented ballet dancers would live in a world where every context involving ballet dancers is designed and tailored for talentless dancers. That's not a good outcome.
We have to accept the fact that we cannot control whether people learn. Kids and families will make their own decisions.
Yep. And that's true in the current system and has been for a long time--no one advocating self-directed education would say otherwise.
I was more thinking about the many OTHER functions that primary & secondary school serve in our society that would need to be outsourced in some other way instead if schooling were made optional.
That's a great question, and I don't know the answer, but I would suggest that school should never have taken on those other functions.
One option is to just let the students go, and see where the chips fall. We should consider lowering the age of employment for certain kinds of jobs. A fifteen year old should be allowed to find a job.
This seems harsh, but it is better than forcing all the smart and motivated students to share classrooms and hallways with totally unmotivated students.
Honest question: where were all the teachers when the internet pornographers came after your students (the target audience make no mistake) 20 years ago? And every day since ? MIA. Regaining credibility might begin with admitting you abandoned your students by your silence. The progressive brainwashing continues.
If the purpose is to teach writing, I can think of some things that AI can't help with (yet). I write two Substacks. One of them, "Ataraxia or Bust!," I suppose, could be filled with AI content (not that it would be the content I want, but it could pass as content that readers might expect). The other cannot be done by AI because AI doesn't know it. That one is "Nottingham Blog." It's about what's happening in a tiny rural New England town. AI can't even generate a useful summary of board meetings. I'm reminded here about Pirsig's advice about writing about a brick in the opera house. It's something so particular, so unique, that it may escape the "it has been said before"/"it can be said by AI" ditch.