Really? A necessity? For whom? Why?

You know what is necessary in the classroom in the digital age? Screen-free learning where students use their own minds and opportunities to develop interpersonal skills through in-person, face-to-face interaction.

Look, if I had a problem and AI could solve it, I’d be psyched, but so far in my experience, it mostly causes new problems without solving any of the old ones. The two greatest problems I have faced in my classroom are as old as my profession: A lack of intrinsic motivation in my students to master the skills of English class and not enough time in the day to juggle the numerous demands of my job.

Theoretically, AI could help with problem number 2, except actually it can’t. My few efforts to use AI to do my work faster have been uninspiring and resulted in time wasted, not time saved. When I try to use it to create teaching materials, I waste so much time getting the prompt right that I could have just done the task myself. Even when it appears to do what I wanted, the stuff it spits out tends to be superficial and flawed, so I have to spend large amounts of time editing it.

As for using it to assess student work, I have strong objections. Education is relational. How can I form good relationships with my students if I outsource giving them feedback? And if I let AI assess them, why shouldn’t they let AI do their assignments?

Maybe we can just skip school altogether. My AI can give their AI assignments and then their AI can hand their assignments in to my AI which can grade and return them. And I can stay home and drink good coffee and read good books, and they can stay home and drink Celsius and watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games.

Students will not get intrinsic motivation from a bot. They get it by discovering their unique passions and by engaging in communities that value hard work and thoughtfulness.

The plight of educators won’t be fixed by a bot. Want to support teachers? Start by reducing class sizes and protecting teachers’ planning time.

You know what teachers are sick of? Being told to do more with less. Offering educators AI as a teaching assistant is one more way of saying, “We aren’t going to fix the structural problems in education or have meaningful conversations about cultural values, but we are going to give you this thing you never asked for and don’t want and it’s up to you to figure out how to use it. We good?”

I would love to see a side-by-side comparison of how teacher salaries have changed over the past twenty years versus how spending on educational technology has changed.

So, no, AI is not a necessity. Not in the classroom or anywhere else.

Sure, the tech companies want us to think it’s inevitable. Their wealth depends on it. But whatever they want us to believe, humans have lived without AI for millennia, and sometimes they have even lived well. AI is a product trap. I, for one, am not falling for it.

Perspective is all a matter of where you train your attention. From my perspective, there’s a lot of backlash against and mistrust of AI brewing, and I am here for it.

One of my hobbies lately is collecting articles on peoples’ attitudes toward AI, just to reassure myself I’m not alone. If you also need reassurance, allow me to present a a small collection of gift links so you can bask in some anti-AI solidarity:

What AI Kant Do - on the value of the humanities in the AI-era

Why College Grads are Booing their Commencement Speakers - kids who experienced the AI shift in the middle of their formative years aren’t in love with it

What AI did to my College Class - A Stanford student on the way AI has shaped his college experience for the worse

What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens - I’m not the only early adopter of educational technology who has made a reversal!

Why Silicon Valley is Turning to the Catholic Church - not exactly an anti-AI article, but a really interesting insight into how tech firms are approaching the moral dilemmas of their products

If you’re looking for a good book on resisting AI in the classroom, I recommend More Than Words by .

Remember, we get to decide if AI is inevitable. In the twenty-first century, the rule is that the loudest one wins, so let’s be louder than the tech bros.

If you’ve seen some good articles or resources lately, please share in the comments!

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I can still remember the admissions brochure arriving in our mailbox sometime in the spring of 1996. On the front cover was a photograph of a bucolic field, sunlight shining through morning mist on some grazing sheep. The text on the bottom of the image read, “These are not our students.” I was sold. This was it. This was the college for me.

Even as a silly seventeen-year-old1, the educational philosophy of Hampshire College resonated with me. At Hampshire, students weren’t lumped into freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. Rather, they moved through three divisions, at the pace appropriate to them. They didn’t choose narrow majors, instead taking a self-directed, project-based approach. They got written feedback by way of report cards instead of grades. This, I knew, even as a kid, was what a true education looked like. I wanted in.

So, in November of my senior year, my dad and I drove from Northeast PA up to the Pioneer Valley in Western Mass on a Friday night in order to attend Hampshire’s open house on Saturday. We stayed in the town of Amherst, dining for the very first time that night at the famed restaurant Judy’s (now closed, alas), and wandering through several bookstores. A tiny town with multiple colleges and multiple bookstores and great restaurants. I was in love in with Western Mass from the minute I got there.

Saturday morning after I took my dad out for breakfast—it was his birthday!—we headed over to Hampshire. It was the big fall open house, but there was a decided lack of fanfare to greet would-be students. We were pointed toward a tour guide, a nontraditional-aged student who was wearing sunglasses indoors. She had brightly colored dreadlocks and was dressed in a way I could only describe as hippy-grunge. There were two other people on the tour, a guy with big spacers in his earlobes and a motorcycle jacket and a slightly older woman who seemed very cool in a Reality Bites sort of way. In my memory, neither other prospective student was accompanied by a parent. Just so you can fully understand the picture: I was wearing a Scranton Prep Cheerleading letterman jacket and was with my clean-shaven, sport-coat wearing father, who happened to be a federal judge. Which of these things doesn’t belong?

As we made our way around campus on that late autumn morning, someone on the tour—possibly the tour guide—smoked cigarettes between buildings. Highlights of the tour included the Residential Life office where students could go for mousetraps and a tiered lecture hall that had no desks or chairs because when it was built, it wasn’t finished in time for the school year, and then, according the tour guide, students decided they preferred it that way.

When the tour was done, my dad looked at me and said, “You cannot go to college here. I’m not sure this school is financially sound.” He had inferred this from the state of the campus. He wasn’t wrong. While Hampshire was still decades away from closing, it wasn’t exactly thriving financially.

I might not have had my dad’s financial intuition, but even on a short visit I could see just how far outside the norm Hampshire was, and I knew I wasn’t ready for a leap that big. Still, I was disappointed.

At seventeen, I already understood that school did not necessarily equal education. It is possible to be really good at school without engaging in deep learning, and my inquisitive mind didn’t want to just keep doing school. I wanted something closer to enlightenment. I always was a dreamer.

But I knew then, and I can attest with great confidence thirty years later, that I wasn’t ready for the self-directed nature of Hampshire’s program. Hampshire was a place for people who didn’t so much need college as they needed room to focus, full time, on their passions and projects and to have their intellectual pursuits to taken seriously.

You can’t get student loans to hang out at the public library all day reading books. Conducting your own independent research does not get you the recognizable credential of a college diploma. Hampshire College offered students a balance of independence, instruction, and support, and that ever-important piece of paper awaiting students at the end of their studies, a touch of conformity to help with the transition to normal life. It was a place where people like Ken Burns could thrive. It wasn’t for everyone, but it nonetheless offered something really important: A true education, as opposed to just one more layer of school.

But the societally recognized stamp of approval that is a college diploma has lost a lot of its luster. Accordingly to a recent Gallup poll, only 35% of Americans now see college was “very important.” Tuitions have skyrocketed out of control. The job market new college grads face is grim. Factor in all the uncertainty AI and its disruptions to so many industries, and popular stories about billionaire college dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, and it’s not hard to see where the skepticism about the value of college has come from.

A team at Yale recently looked into the factors driving down confidence in the higher education system and found that colleges themselves are largely to blame. The authors explain that universities are “expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable.”

Of course, they can’t be all things to all people. Hampshire knew it couldn’t. It knew it was only for some people. As Ken Burns described Hampshire, “It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional… A college education is, to some, like a Louis Vuitton handbag. And that’s not Hampshire.”

But admitting that you’re only for some people is not a good business model, especially not for a tuition-dependent institution.

It might be easy to write off the closure of Hampshire as the end of an experiment in nontraditional education, but, according to bestcolleges.com, 49 private or non-profit colleges have closed since March 2020, and 40 have merged or announced mergers with other universities.

Hampshire isn’t an outlier; it’s one more dead canary in the liberal arts coal mine. As part of the Five College Consortium, it’s a relatively high profile closure here in Massachusetts, more surprising than some of the lesser known schools that have also recently folded, but still part of a trend. The fact is as that as long as people mistake the transaction of school for the transformative experience of education, as long as the primary concern of the “consumers” of higher ed2 is ROI measured in dollars and cents, liberal arts colleges are a tough sell. This isn’t a new sentiment; but it is, like so many undesirable things, proliferating.

You can’t measure the value of a transformative education in money, but we live in a society where the only measure of value many people understand is money. Education is counter cultural. It’s radical. And, like poetry, there’s very little money in it.

While I didn’t go to Hampshire, I’m sad that it’s closing, because I still believe in its model of education. I’m sad for its current students, and I’m sad that it won’t be there as a option for students in the future.

On that gray November day in 1996, there was no point in dad and me continuing with any other open house activities at Hampshire, but it was early in the day and we’d driven all the way to Amherst, so we regrouped. We drove back into town and went to the admissions office at Amherst College, where we had an amazing tour. Then we drove through the campus of UMass, but we didn’t stop because I knew I didn’t want to attend a big university.

There were two more colleges in the Five College Consortium, Smith and Mount Holyoke. Both women’s colleges (at the time I would have called them “girls’ schools”) and no way was I going to one of those. As college promotional materials had arrived in our mailbox that year, I had thrown out every single brochure I’d received from any women’s colleges without even looking at them.

But we had driven all that way, and we had time for one more tour, so we chose Mount Holyoke, simply because it was convenient to our route home. It was a late tour, just me and my dad and the tour guide. Even on a bleak November afternoon, the campus was stunning. My dad and I had been on a quite a few college tours that fall, but from the moment I set foot on the campus at Mount Holyoke, I felt at home in a way I hadn’t anywhere else. I was suddenly reconsidering my ban on women’s colleges.

It must have been dusk by the time we left South Hadley for home. We were hoping to get home in time for dinner and dad’s birthday cake, but the weather had other plans. As we crossed from New York into Pennsylvania the rain turned to ice, and somewhere near Lake Wallenpaupak the Pennsylvania State Police closed interstate 1-84. All traffic stopped.

There we were, stuck in the car in the middle of nowhere, awaiting permission to drive on. My dad took out his brief case and got to work. I opened my backpack and made a half-hearted attempt to learn calculus. Eventually, bored of school stuff, I opened the admissions materials I’d received at Mount Holyoke, which at the time came in a beautiful box and not an envelope. In the box were several booklets. One by one I read them, cover to cover. By the time my dad and I got home that night, somewhere around 11pm, I had a new first choice of colleges.

I went to Western Mass that weekend certain I wanted a non-traditional college experience, and it turns out that I was right. The best fit for me was a single-sex education, something fewer than 5% of college students choose.

And even though Mount Holyoke was traditional in the way its programs of studies and grades worked, it was a place where I was able to have transformational experience of education. I never felt like I was competing with other students, and I was able to design my own course of studies in an interdisciplinary major. My love of learning was rewarded and encouraged. My choices were not about career-readiness, although I never doubted I was gaining skills that would allow me to contribute meaningfully to society once I had graduated. I got to spend four years developing my mind. I recognize my college years as an incredible gift. My studies weren’t exactly practical in a career sense, but then again, my education was very much an experience of self-discovery, and figuring out who you are might just be the most practical thing in the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Schooling that prepares a person for a career is important. But right now there’s a narrative that all schooling should be focused on career-readiness, and that emphasis has made school transactional. In transactional schooling, the outcome—test scores, college placement, job placement, starting salary, grad school acceptance—reigns. When the outcome is the focus, the process or learning is devalued. When the process is devalued, students have more incentive to cheat than to learn. When people can earn degrees without actually learning skills and content, degrees lose their value. It’s a feedback loop. It’s bad for everyone. Education is not a simple transaction. It’s a process of transformation. Good outcomes are a happy side effect.

And, anyway, a liberal arts education may not look like career readiness, but in our fast-changing world, it might the best real-world preparation there is. What students of the liberal arts learn is how to think, how to analyze and evaluate information, how to speak and write, how to make connections, how to learn. When you know how to learn, you can adapt to the changes life throws at you.

It’s a perilous time for liberal arts colleges right now, as the closure of Hampshire shows. Some estimates suggest that up to a quarter of all colleges in the US could close in the coming years. According to a PBS report, “nearly 450 of the nation's 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next decade.”

The best liberal arts colleges—think Williams, Amherst, Colby—are doing great. They are as selective as Ivies with robust endowments and everything to offer their students. And while those highly selective and very expensive schools do their best to bring in culturally and socioeconomically diverse student bodies, a great liberal arts education shouldn’t be such a precious commodity that only the privileged few can access it. We need liberal arts colleges that are accessible to anyone who wants to partake in a transformative education. As the less selective schools shut their doors, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for already underprivileged students. The gap widens between the haves and have nots.

In my last essay in this series, I argued that the best schools will move forward in our AI age with smaller class sizes, more personalized learning and more student choice in their classes to leverage intrinsic motivation. That’s what the best (and best-funded) liberal arts colleges already do.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, more than I can endeavor to tackle in this one essay, but if the professors at Yale are right, if it’s true that colleges themselves are partially to blame for the current low public opinion of higher education, then it’s time for colleges to hurry up and start saving themselves, and they can probably start by figuring out how to decrease the cost of an education.

While they are working on that, those of us who benefitted from liberal arts educations need to make some noise. We can’t sit silently while certain uninformed others spread the narrative that world doesn’t need more English majors (or history majors or anthropology majors). What the world needs now more than ever are people who know how to think and know how to learn.

Did you attend a liberal arts college? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments!

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This year is my twenty-fourth as a high school English teacher (twenty-fifth if you could my internship year in grad school). In the quarter of a century I’ve stood at the front of a classroom imparting wisdom on such subjects as the Shakespearean Sonnet, the correct punctuation of appositive phrases, and the unreliable narrator in twentieth century literature, the conditions under which I labor have experienced a radical transformation. The content is the same, but very little else is.

Picture me at twenty-three years old, looking more than a little like Velma from Scooby Doo, and with her know-it-all tendencies, too. I taught in classrooms with chalkboards—actual chalkboards with dusty chalk and erasers you could clap to produce clouds of dust—teaching from massive textbooks that I lugged from room to room, as I didn’t have a classroom of my own.

If I wanted to use a PowerPoint presentation, I had to sign out a projector on a cart and roll it down the hall to my room. If I wanted to show a movie, I had to sign out a TV with a DVD and VHS player on a cart and roll it down the hall to my room. When I taught grammar, I used a transparency projector. While I had a school-issued laptop, very few students had laptops, and those who did were typically computer nerds and gamers. To access the internet, I had to connect with an ethernet cable. If I wanted students to type essays, I signed out a computer lab and took my classes there to write essays on desktop machines.

Each day, I wrote the homework on the chalkboard and told students to write it down in their agenda books, which they were required to buy with their textbooks and gym uniforms and combination locks. Teachers had static webpages for their classes, created in Microsoft Publisher and uploaded via FTP servers. We were light years away from “learning management systems,” aka student portals. I certainly did not update the homework there daily.

Other things that did not exist in 2002:

• Smartphones and tablets

• Facebook / Instagram / TikTok

• YouTube / Netflix

• Wireless earbuds (like Airpods) and smartwatches

Slowly at first, and then all of sudden, things changed. During a building renovation, the chalkboards were replaced with whiteboards and every classroom got a ceiling-mounted computer projector. This was, by and large, a welcome update, a nice bit of modernization. Then came the wifi. No more need to be tethered to the wall for internet connection, and, oh, yeah, students could access the wifi, too, so they could bring their laptops and access the world of knowledge available online.

And right around this moment is when Big Tech started its insidious creep into the classroom. We moved away from Microsoft Office Suite and toward Google Education. We ditched our ragtag static websites for Blackbaud’s learning management portal. My daily workflow changed, little by little, so gradually that I hardly noticed it. I was posting the homework on the board, and saying it out loud, and posting it in the portal. Instead of just projecting my slides, I was also posting them in online topics pages. Instead of just answering emails from students, parents, and colleagues, now I was answering emails and portal messages. But these were small things and routines in my classroom generally proceeded in the same way they had for nearly two decades.

Then our textbooks went out of print and the replacements were dumbed down books that relied in shorter and shorter excerpts from the literature in thematic units that did little to provide essential context, or by digital textbooks delivered through publishers’ e-learning platforms.

And then COVID. The shift into a fully digital environment. Every single routine completely upended, and not just for the spring of the 2019-2020 school year, but for the entire 2020-2021 school year, and beyond.

I did so much work moving my assignments and assessments online during that strange time, so even when school returned to “normal,” I decided to continue being a tech-forward teacher. I had always been willing to experiment with technology in my classroom from having students make wikis in the early 2000s to doing a video projects in the early 2010s when smartphones became ubiquitous. I had always seen technology as a way to add novelty and enhance skills development, but after COVID, technology wasn’t an enhancement, it was a constant.

In many ways, the digital environment made my life easier. For instance, once I had done the work to set up online assessments, the objective portions graded themselves and even appeared in the online Gradebook with the click of a button. Ah, the labor-saving. Essays collected online meant no folders of paper to lug around and no miserable handwriting to read. No hours fighting with the photocopier and its endless paper jams and empty toner cartridges. Win, win, win.

What I couldn’t see at the time were the many costs of this shift, even before we factor in the public release of large language model AI in 2022, which, of course, changed everything. But I see the costs now. I see them, and I’ve made a hard swerve back into the land of analog. Paper assessments, handwritten essays, teaching and learning without any screens between us. To prevent the rampant cheating AI enables, yes, but also because when we rely on the bells and whistles of digital learning tools in the name of increasing engagement, we are actually replacing thinking with paradoxically passive stimulation that looks like productivity but, for most students1, does not yield real learning. Learning in a digital environment decreases critical thinking, erodes attention span, diminishes persistence, and leads to poorer outcomes.

Simply, what I’ve come to believe—based on the anecdotal evidence of my own experience and that of my colleagues, as well as the evidence of much research on the impact of technology in the classroom—is that we must resist the influence of Big Tech on education.

Tech companies don’t care about education. They care about profits. They care about creating the consumers of the future. They cannot be trusted with something as valuable as the intellectual, moral, and personal development of children. Google and Apple raced to get Chromebooks and iPads into classrooms not because they could improve educational outcomes (and we know that educational outcomes have actually worsened in the years since one-to-one initiatives became common) but because they want to hook kids on their products and thereby create lifelong users like drug dealers in the schoolyard offering out a free sample. The drug in question: Dopamine.

When ChatGPT first launched, I made a prediction about the future of education and I stand it by now several years later:

Wealthy, well-funded schools will move toward smaller class-sizes and more personalized education to leverage students’ intrinsic motivation and ensure they get the skills and content they need. Less affluent and poorly funded schools will move toward larger class-sizes because teachers can use AI to manage their workload and because AI can be a teaching assistant to offer differentiation and tutoring. And in this way, the chasm between the upper and lower classes will grow, because whatever Big Tech tells you, ChatBots do the work human teachers do.

This is not a future I want, so I would very much like my prediction to be wrong, but I am not hopeful.

Still, to paraphrase folk singer Catie Curtis, I can’t change the world, but maybe I can change the world within my reach. And that is why I have changed my approach to teaching again, and it is why I’m writing this series.

If you are a teacher, parent, or just a concerned citizen who wants to think about the way forward in education in our strange time, these posts are for you, and I hope you’ll subscribe, share, and leave a comment.