51吃瓜

Many of us have been asking for some time this embarrassing question: In the age of sophisticated science and technology as well as unprecedented economic prosperity, why has education become our civilization鈥檚 Achilles heel? Thinking people with some sense of the depth and breadth of human culture 鈥� and not just Western culture 鈥� realize that somewhere along the line, as the rich get obscenely richer, the very notion of education has become impoverished. 

Educational innovators from , to have sought and sometimes succeeded to buck the trend, but not quite to turn it around.

For most of the past two centuries in the developed nations, education has focused on adapting to the reality of an industrial revolution that unconsciously but inexorably changed the raison d鈥櫭猼re of entire societies. Prior to the industrial age, the population bathed in a set of inherited communal and wider traditions that defined a complex and connected religious, artisanal, artistic and moral framework featuring knowledge and skills that linked together, serving as a reference for the community. That culture varied locally but its shared framework also looked outward, pointing towards the universal.

During the Middle Ages, a plethora of innovative educational institutions emerged. Monastic Schools, Cathedral or Episcopal Schools taught the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), laying the groundwork for the first universities. Chantry & Song Schools promoted literacy for boys. Guild Apprenticeships and Workshop Education focused on craftsmanship, leading to master status within the guild. Successful apprentices produced a 鈥榤asterpiece鈥� to prove their acquisition and refinement of skills, endowing them with the status of 鈥渋ndependent masters of their craft.鈥�

Merchant & Abacus Schools inculcated vernacular literacy, commercial bookkeeping, double-entry accounting and practical business mathematics. Village schools taught basic reading, writing and moral instruction in the vernacular, as well as introductory Latin. And of course, Europe鈥檚 universities emerged as self-governing academic corporations dedicated to a growing population of scholars. Geoffrey Chaucer describes the mindset of his 鈥渃lerk of Oxenford鈥� (Oxford scholar) in the Canterbury Tales: 鈥済ladly would he learn and gladly teach.鈥�

Is today鈥檚 era the 鈥淒ark Ages鈥� of education?

Contrary to popular myths about the 鈥淒ark Ages,鈥� medieval intellectual life was not confined to repeating and justifying religious dogma. While the Western Church largely funded and governed institutional education, scholasticism had already synthesized classical logic and philosophy into university curricula by the 13th century. The era鈥檚 diverse institutions 鈥� from cathedral schools to guild-run legal faculties 鈥� stand in sharp contrast to modern, highly standardized educational models.

Industrial and even more flagrantly post-industrial education 鈥� guided by the pursuit of efficiency and utility 鈥� have radically transformed our sense of the purpose and meaning of education. Although it could and probably should have turned out differently, the emergence over the past half-century of several generations of educational technology, culminating today with AI, has largely aggravated the trend.

When ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, the entire world of education fell into a state of panic. Instead of seeking to understand what a 鈥渓arge language model,鈥� with its access to an immeasurable breadth of knowledge and discourse, might bring to education, the educational community and the media focused on one exclusively negative thing: the threat that chatbots would facilitate cheating.

Nearly four years later, nothing has changed. Perhaps it鈥檚 because we live in a civilization that has literally become paranoid, governed by its fears and an obsession with security in an atmosphere of permanent suspicion. We perceive all change initially as a threat not only to our precious status quo but to our sense of earned authority. Such an increasingly gated-community culture, obsessed by security, will always be blind to opportunities.

Since January 2023, I鈥檝e been authoring 51吃瓜 columns dedicated to the use of AI as a tool of creativity and education. At that time I was actively teaching as a visiting professor in an Indian university. That is when in my classroom I dared to suggest to my students that chatbots not only did not deserve to be feared, but that they could play an active, essential role in reviving the spirit of exploratory, collaborative creativity that has at various moments in human history enlivened the ethos of education.

A case that illustrates the deeper problem

The headline of a recent by Futurism, 鈥淧rofessor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible,鈥� demonstrates the dominant mindset in education today: punitive, if not simply paranoid. The article鈥檚 subtitle summarizes the facts: 鈥淭hirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response.鈥� The article recounts how history professor Jason Gibson literally tricked his students into copying a prompt with an invisible instruction 鈥� typed in white font 鈥� to prove that they were too lazy to write their own essay.

I agree that any student who delegates their response to an assignment to AI deserves to be failed. But, in this specific case, I would also extend that honor to the professor who tricked the students to expose them. To my mind, it revealed more about the failings of the system of authority baked into our post-industrial educational culture than it did about the lack of discipline of 32 students. Gibson鈥檚 trickery did prove a point. But it also highlights another more uncomfortable point: that authority (the teacher) has the right to use trickery, but those subjected to that authority must not cheat.

In the age of AI, it may be time to ask a different question. Suspicion and shaming as a pedagogic method have their limits. Has it occurred to no one in the educational profession that using transparency and honesty may be a more effective approach in fostering genuine learning? Apparently not, because educators and their institutions give priority to formatting, ranking and surveilling over learning.

What did Gibson鈥檚 鈥渆xperiment鈥� prove? The first conclusion should have been predictable: If given the opportunity, students will cheat. But it demonstrated something more profound and worth considering, that 鈥� unlike Chaucer鈥檚 clerk 鈥� they aren鈥檛 interested in what they鈥檙e supposed to be learning.

Students cheat because our society teaches them above all to focus on outcomes. The whole point of education is to get the best grades and the best diploma, not to acquire well scaffolded learning. Cramming for a test isn鈥檛 all that different from a form of cheating: it gives the impression of learning without the engagement. Not only is cramming legitimate cheating, it鈥檚 a form of superficial, discardable retention, what we might truly call 鈥渁rtificial, evanescent intelligence.鈥� The method is built into the logic of the system, in which only performance on a test is measured and rewarded… never understanding, curiosity, critical thinking and open-minded, analogical reasoning. Those qualities are too difficult to measure in a formal, standardized test.

Is it time to write a history of technology in education?

Gibson would be right to mistrust the role our society appears to be asking AI to play: that of a super-authority, with valid answers to every question. But he doesn鈥檛 mistrust our society鈥檚 approach to AI, he mistrusts his learners who are using AI in exactly the way they have been told the tool was intended to be used: to save time and energy. As a historian, he might be curious enough to examine the history of our civilization鈥檚 exploitation of technology. Were he to do so, he would discover that every new technology has invited misuse alongside all the socially constructive, productive uses their vendors highlight in their marketing pitch.

Gibson used a ruse to get his students to fall into a predictable trap. It made for a good demonstration of at least two things: the propensity of people, and not just students, to misuse AI, and the general failure of our society even to aspire to foster good practices, let alone define them. The professor鈥檚 own conclusion is correctly observed, as far as it goes. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know best practices for navigating academia with AI.鈥� That sounds like an excuse for his own bad behavior. His method, which goes no further than defining AI as a threat, is defensive rather than corrective. He appears to admit that it鈥檚 all about maintaining an undefined status quo. 鈥淲e鈥檙e all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.鈥�

Since he appears to value integrity, he might have used the assignment as a demonstration of the very structural paradoxes that surround the idea of integrity. He effectively cheated in how he framed the task. Instead of simply inviting students to contest their grades, he could have reframed the exercise as a systemic experiment 鈥� akin to the double-bind and paradoxical communication pioneered by Gregory Bateson and the Palo Alto School 鈥� to reveal how predictable patterns of behavior emerge under contradictory rules.

If Gibson had chosen to transparently expose the process as an experiment, his students would have been in a position to judge and critically assess their own behavior in a specific context rather than simply being shamed. At the very least this would allow them to appreciate the fragility of depending on AI. At best, Gibson and his students would have raised their mutual level of consciousness not only about what AI can and can鈥檛 do, but how our society has turned misuse into a behavioral norm.

By facing the challenge of AI with total transparency, the professor and the students would find themselves in a novel situation, as they collectively produce a new level of understanding. This would also imply that the psychological wall of authority that traditionally separates teachers from learners would become porous. Having lived through the experience and analyzed it collaboratively, they would thus have discovered not only what it means to 鈥済ladly learn鈥� but also 鈥済ladly teach鈥� one another.

*[The Devil鈥檚 Advocate pursues the tradition 51吃瓜 began in 2017 with the launch of our 鈥淒evil鈥檚 Dictionary.鈥� It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself 鈥� political and journalistic rhetoric 鈥� to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51吃瓜 Devil鈥檚 Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider鈥檚 point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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The views expressed in this article are the author鈥檚 own and do not necessarily reflect 51吃瓜鈥檚 editorial policy.