Preface
When I interviewed Prof. Sophie Klein in the fall, our discussion felt particularly uplifting to me. It's perhaps a bit ironic, as the subject matter we discussed was particularly heavy. We talked about some of the fundamental problems with education, and in particular, the critique of education presented by certain texts and figures of Antiquity.
One of those critiques is the case against democracy presented by the "Old Oligarch," which I discuss in a good amount of detail in my speech Keeping AI out of the Classroom. But the pre-eminent example of a classical text critiquing education is The Clouds by Aristophanes.
The protagonist, entering "The Thinkery" in the hopes of getting educated, sees the disciples of Socrates with their heads literally in the ground and their behinds in the air, described as investigating what is below while also performing "astronomy." The story ultimately leads to a debate between the personified "Superior Argument" and the "Inferior Argument," where the Inferior Argument wins by pointing out how many powerful Athenians have been schooled by it.
The harsh satirization of the educational system displayed by Aristophanes, which I discussed with Prof. Klein and then later read—with a copy she graciously loaned to me at the end of the interview—was the primary inspiration for this essay.
There was another thing Prof. Klein said that inspired me to write this essay, though. She brought up that students being drawn to AI makes perfect sense—humans always want to take the path of least resistance when faced with a challenge. That statement made me think a lot about incentives. What are undergraduate students incentivized to produce in say, their writing assignments? Now, take a look at the Google Docs file of this essay I've been working on...
The Core texts are the texts covered in Boston University's Core Curriculum sequence. These interesting texts can teach us a lot about the role of AI in writing. In this essay, I will discuss three of these texts: Michel de Montaigne's "On the Education of Children," Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I will argue that these texts can be closely connected to the role AI can play in our writing.
In "On the Education of Children," Michel de Montaigne discusses how students should not just be taught how to memorize, but how to actually critically think for themselves. Montaigne says that education should be conducted with a "firm gentleness," so that the student is oriented properly but is still pushing themselves to study what they want. This is very closely related to AI since AI takes the aspect of critical thinking away from the person using it, and just gives them boilerplate answers.
Don Quixote, on the other hand, expresses this connection more subtly through the character of Sansón Carrasco. Carrasco is a university student with a bachelor's degree, referring to himself by the title "Bachelor." In Part Two of the text, Carrasco notes that the interpolated stories in Part One that didn't focus on Don Quixote, the main character, were useless in the text. Here, Cervantes portrays Carrasco as doing a surface reading of Part One of the text, which can be tied to AI in the way that it can summarize texts from its training data, but not examine them closely or build connections on them in the way a human could.