How Educators Can Defeat AI

James Walsh’s viral recent New York article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” was not notable because it revealed the extent to which AI has taken over education; that much was already obvious to anyone who has been around a school or college lately. Rather, what Walsh’s reporting brought to light was the degree to which college-age students have developed an internally coherent theory of why they have the right to use AI. It isn’t just that everyone is getting AI to do their homework for them, but the blithe indifference with which everyone is cheating. Gens Z and Alpha lack the cultural immune system that provokes a resistance to AI among older cohorts. ChatGPT is finishing the job that iPhones started, raising a cohort defined not only by illiteracy but by hostility to literacy.

Having spent most of my adult life at least partly in education—teaching and tutoring history, English, and theater—I feel comfortable stating the following: The destruction of the take-home essay will necessitate deep reform and a renegotiation of our collective understanding of what it means to be educated. It is also an opportunity to reconnect education to spiritual ideas (if not spiritual practice). ChatGPT has revealed how soulless the process of writing essays for students had become. The only way for education, and the kinds of literacy that schools promote, to serve as a bulwark against academic fraud is for it to speak to the soul. Until there are higher ends than getting a grade, AI will be used for that. On the other hand, if processes internal to the student are the point of education, then AI might become a valid, if limited, pedagogical tool.

The AI takeover of the writing process is the endpoint of a decades-long deterioration of the conditions that make writing and thinking in long form possible. The information ecosystem that young people participate in has long been inimical to these practices. The essay itself is a relic—one of the last verbal artifacts from a time when young people could reliably be expected to read a few books a year or even voluntarily sit through an entire movie or TV show without getting distracted or tuning out. A return to the standards of 1935—when literate people still regularly wrote letters, told stories, listened to sermons, etc.—is clearly impossible. The conditions of 2000, when I was a teenager, seem nearly as unattainable. I’m not sure if teenagers (discounting rare exceptions) could parse an episode of Seinfeld, let alone Pride and Prejudice. 

The overwhelming adoption of ChatGPT not to research, not to proofread, not to plan, but to print thinking in written form is an admission that young people are not acquiring communication, listening, and critical thinking skills. This doesn’t just happen because Americans have stopped reading difficult books, but for reasons even more mundane: because hardly anyone writes down directions, writes notes or letters, keeps diaries, listens to sermons, tells campfire stories, or organizes games like tag or pickup football with the neighborhood. Young people use fewer words to do fewer things less often, because there are fewer embedded, social rituals in which you need to employ verbal skills. Every year I’ve been teaching or tutoring, I’ve observed a generalized, incremental decline in the ability of teens to organize, index, and relay information.

Schools, reciprocally, have failed to replicate and replace these lost rituals, while transforming into grade and diploma factories which overlook the loss of verbal fluency and may even employ staff who lack it themselves. Because the American education system from kindergarten through graduate school has become about securing diplomas and employment, long-form writing has been transformed from a core demonstration of learning to an impediment. 

The ChatGPT essay is the reductio ad absurdum of the cultural axiom that school is about getting grades. School is about getting into college; college is about networking and getting a job. All this can be achieved without much effort now. So why make the effort? Stressed, screen-addicted young people see absolutely no answer—and the pedagogical culture around them provides no persuasive alternative. The logic of grade inflation and competitive college placement incentivizes doing what you need to do to survive.

Writing essays is like a prehensile tail, an old feature no longer connected to survival. When students turn in ChatGPT papers and, when confronted, defend their right to use ChatGPT, they are dispensing with the fiction that anyone cares—that there’s any value embedded within their community that corresponds to the task of writing at length, of making a sustained critical argument or judgment. Expecting kids who grew up with smartphones and iPads to write a coherent, multi-paragraph argument is like expecting them to know how to perform farm chores like they might have in 1875. There’s no social basis or tradition for the expectation.

This is why schools and educators need to make a radical shift away from fake attainment and towards reading, writing, and verbal communication as a basis for a good life. ChatGPT can do busy work—good. The question remains: What kind of cognitive work is dignified for human beings, however young? What kind of communication, what kind of writing, what kind of reading is meaningful, purposeful, and enriching?

To offer answers that legitimize its continued existence, the secular education system must adopt a position that broadly resembles Christian humanism, for which the value of close reading and sustained writing is rooted in the metaphysical possibilities of a nurtured, sustained soul. This view is backed not only by tradition, but by raw logic: Students need to have a reason for learning to really write. To effectively articulate those reasons, teachers will be expected to model the benefits of functional, passionate literacy. 

Teachers may find that there is no good reason for young people to read and write unless that reason is that they have a soul. And while this creed sounds Christian, it is also compatible with the tradition of secular humanism and sounds as much like William James as Cardinal Newman. The notion of a soul has practical value that protects us against relinquishing our bodies and minds to zombie-like superintelligences. Put differently, any practice that seeks to build up and amplify our own sense of ourselves as human animals with a specific species being is closer to religion than technocracy; AI should push secular humanists and devoted believers closer together.

“Students who feel like machines will use machines.”

After decades in which priests sounded more like public school teachers, more secular in tone and direction, education and educators may have to start to sound more Christian. Pope Leo XIV, who by some accounts chose his name to signal that he would continue where the previous Leo’s critique of the industrial revolution left off, has the opportunity to play a leading role in this shift. Soul as a notion is a rallying point; you can have a soul which goes to heaven, and you can also have a soul so that you’re not a cyborg. Soul—and the embedded concepts of internal coherence, purposiveness, uniqueness—provides incentive to work: a soul, like a muscle, can be built up and trained; a brain, conversely, is just a less efficient LLM. Students who feel like machines will use machines; students who feel like something more might have some reason to draw boundaries with technology.

For decades, an economy defined by bullshit jobs has been served by bullshit school. Work from kindergarten to death feels empty, pointless, and artificial; AI is better suited to the mechanical call and response of this mode, anyway. A return to metaphysics in education might similarly be marked by a return to metaphysics in the workplace—to notions of inherent dignity and meaning. At the very least, young people should be taught that literacy and depth of thought and expression will be necessary means of grappling with artificial intelligence—that they will want the means to offer informed consent to technological advances. And also, to live.