 |
| Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
I recently attended a virtual presentation by Bart Caylor on “Leveraging AI for Your Marketing and Recruitment Efforts.” Caylor’s basic message for higher education, including faculty, is: Get with the program or get left behind. Generative AI is a “neutral tool.” Everyone is using it. “Higher education has neither the ability nor the luxury to lag behind.” Luddites who try to resist the new technology are like math professors in the 1960’s protesting the use of calculators. As a fake quote attributed to Alvin Toffler puts it, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
If we don’t want to be left behind, we must pivot — unlearning and relearning — and embrace GenAI for our marketing, recruitment, leadership and teaching efforts. To be sure, there are challenges: Schools need to have a plan to respond to the inevitability of malign deep-fake videos, for instance. But there are also positive uses of deep-fake technology. Who wouldn’t want to watch a video of our college president extolling the virtues of the education we offer in flawless Russian or Klingon?
Caylor urges us to “lean into AI for chores.” Let AI do the reading, summarizing, brainstorming and speech-writing, so administrators and faculty members can focus on mentoring and relationships. AI can come up with grading rubrics too. AI-grading anyone?
In our new world, AI will take over chores that can be automated. This will mean jobs lost for people who can’t pivot fast enough. But humans will still be required to make decisions, and so Caylor envisages a “liberal arts resurgence” to help develop critical thinking skills—and this could lead to a bright future for colleges like my own.
I appreciate Caylor’s enthusiasm for the liberal arts, but I confess to wondering what he thinks it means. How does he imagine a liberal arts education will produce the creativity and critical thinking skills we need, if not by the reading and writing “chores” AI can supposedly replace?
Let me counter Caylor’s 1960’s math professor analogy with an example from sports. Attempting to outsource the “chores” of brainstorming and the hard work of crafting sentences to a large language model is like getting a robot to run your basketball drills so you can spend more time playing the game. With critical thinking as with any other skill, there is no substitute for practice. And the foundation of critical thinking is basic literacy. As David Brooks puts it:
“[L]iteracy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. ... Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.”
In other words, Caylor and other AI cheerleaders miss the whole point of education. Our responsibility as teachers includes helping students learn what it means to work with their minds, and prompting them to forge the neural pathways that will enable them to think creatively and make difficult decisions. These critical thinking skills depend on the “chores” of reading and writing, and they are even more essential in a world where truth and lies are so thoroughly mixed together.
Because it offers an easy alternative to the hard work of thinking, GenAI makes the job of teaching way harder. GenAI gets in the way of learning; it stunts development. It is, in my view, a major threat to the basic literacy of reading and writing, as well as to the additional literacy of “learning how to learn” that Alvin Toffler really did call for in 1970:
“Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn. ... By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. ... Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.’” - Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 367.
This kind of literacy—one that assumes and builds on the literacy of reading and writing—is a pedagogical goal I can stand behind, but it is impeded not advanced by the uncritical adoption of our latest technology.
