Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing. At Williams College, where I am a professor, writing skills are among the very few general education requirements.
It’s no surprise, then, that universities see artificial intelligence as an existential threat, and have launched an arms race of countermeasures: more proctored essay exams; test-taking rooms shielded from the internet; requirements that essays be composed on platforms that track all edits, so the word-for-word genealogy can be verified. I’ve heard professors rejoicing when they see typos or grammatical errors in an essay, as if they proved that a student wrote it without any help from A.I.
But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.
In 1980, James Britton, an educator, hypothesized that we discover what we think in the act of writing. “Hypothesized” is the correct word here, since Mr. Britton’s anecdotal and introspective suppositions never amounted to proof of a stronger claim, and studies since have been limited or inconclusive.
Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.
I doubt there are many professors that would agree with this statement. Especially engineering and science professors.
But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought?
What if the author is mistaken in understanding how universities teach, and what other people believe?
This guy is a fucking idiot. Writing is a nice form of communication, and mastering it, helps communicate thought, and helps the learning process.
But there’s an expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words” it’s so common that it’s not a phrase that really gets attributed to anyone (although Wikipedia credits Arthur Brisbane).
And since this idiot professor seems to be in a bubble that shields him from any understanding of people or the outside world, we should look directly into what he teaches: philosophy. Let’s look at one of the most foundational and accessible parts of philosophy:
I couldn’t read the rest of the article, but it seems he’s going in the direction of jerking AI off - this makes sense considering he can’t make a coherent argument or even set a good foundation for a coherent argument in 4 paragraphs. If the rest of his article could read and comprehend and make faces, this would probably be the expression it’d make:
I mean a deep oral tradition full of memorization and discussion like the proto-greek city states had would work too (for philosophy), but universities don’t have the resources to implement the small classes and staff the oral examinations that would be required to make that style of teaching effective. Administratively it’s wildly inefficient.
