Two years ago, on November 30, OpenAI made their text generator software ChatGPT available to the public. On December 1, millions of students across the world stopped doing their homework. Why would they spend hours on meaningless assignments when they could ask the highly sophisticated chatbot to do it for them?
I wised up to the fact that my students were using AI early on. I created an OpenAI account and started plugging in my essay prompts to see what it could do. I watched with amusement and horror: It spat out C-level essays in seconds.
The advent of ChatGPT created a crisis in education. In the cat-and-mouse game of modern schooling, the mice got a massive advantage. The old plagiarism detectors, so adept at flagging copy-and-paste jobs, wouldn’t recognize the infinitely variable AI-generated text. The crisis became existential; the Atlantic even argued that ChatGPT augured “The End of High-School English.”
Meanwhile, many schools and universities attempted to make a truce with the new technology. Harvard University currently advises high school students in its summer program that they can use AI to “come up with ideas for essays. For example, input specific prompts, such as, ‘Please give me five ideas for essays I can write on topics related to WWII.’ . . . Then, use what it provides as a starting point for your original research.”
Once an idea is generated, students could then “use ChatGPT to help [them] create an outline for an essay. Ask it, ‘Can you create an outline for a five paragraph essay based on the following topic’ and it will create an outline with an introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, and a suggested thesis statement.” But, Harvard avers, this is where using AI must stop. AI-generated idea and outline in hand, students need to “expand upon the outline with your own research and original thought.”
But why should the use of AI stop with creating the idea and the outline? In a jumble of contradictions, Harvard tells their students that “Writing an essay yourself means that you’re developing your own thoughts, opinions, and questions about the subject matter, then testing, proving, and defending those thoughts.” However, if the AI generated their ideas and their outlines, students will find themselves “testing, proving, and defending” the “thoughts” of a bot. And why should anyone care to “test, prove, or defend” any thoughts, genuine human thoughts or the AI-generated appearance of thought, anyways? Because “building a foundation of original thinking and ideas now will help you carve your unique career path in the future.” And over-reliance on AI will short-circuit students’ ability to develop “critical thinking skills,” which “aren’t just necessary in school—they’re skills you’ll apply throughout your career and your life.” Ultimately, according to Harvard, the best argument against using AI to write one’s entire essay relies on preserving a students’ ability to forge a career in our technocratic economy which, however, is itself becoming more dependent on the application of AI.
Both the hysteria of “end of English” and the ridiculous arguments represented by Harvard for how and how not to use AI misunderstand the nature of education. They presuppose that the purpose of education lies in what a student can produce. In this materialist framework, the quality of one’s education is judged by the quality of what one produces. If this were true, AI would indeed pose a serious threat to the very notion of education. For if a machine can produce the same things I can, and the purpose of my education is to increase my capacity to produce things, why bother getting educated?
An education should have nothing to do with negotiating our share of work with robots, however necessary the task may be in the world of labor. Education, though, is not labor; it is a spiritual pursuit. Its goal is to cultivate and nourish our interior lives. As a uniquely human endeavor, it should refine our capacities to think rationally, contemplate reality, appreciate beauty, and feel gratitude. To truly cultivate these capacities, schools must safeguard and encourage what Josef Pieper calls “leisure.”
In his masterpiece Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper explains that leisure is not laziness or mere restfulness, but “a condition of the soul . . . a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality,” not only to receive reality but to do so in a “celebrating spirit.” The man at leisure “remains capable of taking in the world as a whole, and thereby to realize himself as a being who is oriented toward the whole of existence.” Achieving this condition of the soul requires true knowledge: knowledge of oneself in relationship to the cosmos. This knowledge is truly “free” for it is good in itself, the highest and most noble thing one can know, and cannot be subordinated to some other end. It is the fruit of the “liberal” arts.
Fostering this condition of the soul is education’s sole concern. Pieper reminds us, after all, that “The Greek word for leisure . . . is the origin of Latin scola,” from which we derive our word “school.”
Schools should stop operating as product control bureaucracies, where students are subjected to “effective teaching strategies” designed to extract “evidence of learning” that “meet or exceed” academic “standards.” Operating on this “standards-based learning” paradigm, schools put the cart before the horse. It is a disordered metaphysics where matter determines form and doing precedes being. In reality, form determines matter and being precedes doing.
The interior life is qualitative in nature; however, schools deal exclusively with the quantitative. This category error explains the intuitive revulsion most teachers feel about issuing grades and administering standardized tests. The bureaucracy demands numbers, and so we beat numbers out of our students to appease it.
Because the arbitrary numbers used to quantify a students’ work are treated with such import, they are also destructive. Schools are predisposing their students to become what Pieper calls “proletarians,” whose interior life has been so impoverished that “meaningful action that is not work is no longer possible or even imaginable.” Thus, modern schools equate “leisure” with doing nothing, and to cultivate it would mean abandoning students to technological illiteracy and joblessness.
Many souls trapped in this world of “total work” maintain a vague sense that something is amiss, and they rebel against it in various ways. But proletarians accept the rationalization that life can’t be any other way. They embrace total work even as it kills them. Schools have habituated them to a life of servitude as their manufactured “scores” are used to justify the expansion of the educational industrial complex.
Without a rich interior life, proletarians fill the vacuum of their mind with fast, cheap, and accessible entertainment. Having been the slaves of Big Ed, they become the willing slaves of Big Tech, whose algorithms are engineered for addiction. Once addicted, they become passive consumers of whatever products or opinions the algorithm sells them.
To lay the demise of interior life entirely at the feet of schools would be misleading. The war against the interior life is civilizational in scope. Georges Bernanos taught us even in 1947 in his untranslated treatise La France contre les Robots (France Against the Robots) that “modern civilization . . . is an all-encompassing conspiracy against every form of interior life.”
Schools are key players in this grand conspiracy, and so it should be no surprise when they make more and more concessions to AI in the years to come. Having abandoned any notion of leisure and the interior life, only one logical path is available: teaching students to use more technology to do more and produce more.
True schools in the modern age must rebel against the conspiracy. They must become places of leisure, humanizing their students in our dehumanizing culture.
S. A. Dance is a teacher and writer in Northern California.
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Image by John Singer Sargent, via the public domain. Image cropped.
