It seems early, but it’s begun to feel like autumn. Leaves, wind, a certain turn of the air, lights on for washing up after dinner. I don’t mind. I prefer cooler weather and I like to catch sunrise on morning runs.
But it feels strange, because for the first time since I started school at four, no one in my house is going back to formal education. I’m on a career break from university teaching, one son has graduated, the other is taking a year out. No nervous new beginning, no rite of passage.
I’m waiting to see if I still have the seasonal anxiety dreams, probably familiar to teachers at all levels. In mine, I dream that educational qualifications expire after 10 years, which means that I have a few days to re-take the whole lot, everything from GCSE (the English version of Junior Cert) to doctorate. If I can’t remember secondary school Latin or Anglo Saxon grammar or the finer points of my PhD research, I lose my job and my identity with immediate effect.
Then I wake up and I’ve still forgotten how to teach since last year but I also still have the necessary qualifications. (Oh, and this doesn’t mean I’ve been “on holiday” for weeks, it means I’ve been doing other parts of the job that include curriculum design, course planning, examining, postgrad supervision and marking, research.)
So my thinking about the purposes of formal education this week is partly seasonal, and also inspired by discussion about students’ use of AI. I don’t have a settled opinion, but I’m inclined to be more concerned about the environmental cost, the impact on the mental health of people who clean up the content and the effect on general human cognitive capacity than the implications for third-level assessment.
I’ve been teaching literature in universities for 25 years and it’s not that I don’t object if my students cheat, it’s that if they want to cheat, they’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point of higher education.
Clearly in some vocational subjects, it’s necessary for public safety that students learn material and retain it in their minds. One would have limited confidence in a doctor who had to look up basic human anatomy, an aeronautical engineer needing a quick online reminder of the principles of lift, a criminal lawyer who just had to check the definitions of stealing and borrowing. Professionals need to know what they are doing, and the rest of us need to be assured that they do know.
But in the arts and humanities, I’d say, the stakes are different. Not lower. Physical public safety is rarely at risk. If a student uses AI to write a history essay, even if that essay receives a respectable grade (most of the time that’s unlikely because the artificially intelligent writing I’ve seen is usually plausible but inaccurate, which historians are likely to notice), the student has lost far more than anyone else.
[ We need to talk about AI’s staggering ecological impactOpens in new window ]
We require students to research and write essays not because the undergraduate essay is a valuable product but because the research and writing are valuable processes. They are valuable to the student concerned, and maybe in diffuse ways to the society in which that student lives, because it’s good for all of us to have people in the habit of thinking critically and evaluating primary and secondary sources.
While it’s obviously better if those who hold degrees have done the work involved, there’s not much risk to the public from someone pretending to know more about literature than they do. It’s a cliche but, like most cliches, true that students who cheat betray themselves most. I don’t object enough to divert my time and energy to detective work and away from teaching those who are there in good faith.
[ Students must learn to be more than mindless ‘machine-minders’Opens in new window ]
It’s important that not all education is instrumental. Knowledge and scholarship are public goods, making better voters and citizens, at least as much as private assets leading to higher pay.
I want to teach my students to understand how truths can be incompatible and still true; how in the face of justified despair we can still make love and art and dinner; how structures of society and community shape individual identity; how “freedom” and “choice” are circumscribed by politics and economics; how everything gets bigger and more complicated when you pay more attention. If they cheat, they won’t learn. Such knowledge is the real purpose of education; exam results are a byproduct.
