Education by Numbers

By -

 

The human soul is inimitable; Artificial Intelligence, while wildly impressive, will always fall short.

We individual beings are idiosyncratic in a way that is incomputable to machines. 

Many, however, fail to appreciate this indisputable fact and look at humans, not as God's inexplicable creations, but as product-maximizing homo-economici: faceless units whose value is measured by their outputs.  

Schools, in particular, are overly output-driven.

In an article for First Things, S. A. Dance writes that education is "a spiritual pursuit." The spirit is not quantifiable, but rather, something that is cultivated through leisure.

Leisure, Dance recognizes, has become something of a pejorative. Today, leisureliness is seen as indolence. 

Dance and others, however, see leisure as a meditative and reflective practice. A school's goal, he writes, ought to be to "refine our capacities to think rationally, contemplate reality, appreciate beauty, and feel gratitude." 

Modern education, however, prioritizes "standards-based learning," neglecting the nourishment of one's "interior life" in the process. 

Since we have supplanted spiritual education with standards-based education, we have, in effect, sanitized learning of its humanity. In comes AI.

At this point, everyone knows how powerful a tool ChatGPT has become: all you have to do is input a few basic prompts relating to any given subject, and it will spit out a full-length article or essay. 

Dance argues that this technology has only become a threat because we, through our political-economization of academia, have let it:

The interior life is qualitative in nature; however, schools deal exclusively with the quantitative. This category error explains the intuitive revulsion most teachers feel about issuing grades and administering standardized tests. The bureaucracy demands numbers, and so we beat numbers out of our students to appease it.

People, though, cannot be reduced to numbers. To do so is cold and, I would argue, inhumane. 

Education, especially the liberal arts, must be a humanizing endeavor, one that AI could never compete with.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Examining Social Connectedness Abroad

By -
Image
  Non-Western countries are known to be more collectivistic and group-oriented, especially when compared to Western countries like Great Britain and America.  Lawrence Mead, my former professor and thesis supervisor at NYU, articulated this cultural difference in his 2019 book, Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power: ...Western culture is individualist, while non-Western cultures tend to be conformist. Westerners take action largely to fulfill personal goals and values, if necessary, changing the world to do so. In this sense, they live their lives from the inside out. In the non-West, by contrast, most people take their cues largely from without - from their immediate associates, higher authority, or tradition. They adjust to their environment much more than they seek to change it. They live their lives largely from the outside in.  Professor Mead is easily the most valiant and intellectually honest professor that I ever had the honor of taking. He re...
Read more

Do You Believe in Life After the Election?

By -
Image
  We can't let this election - or any subsequent elections, for that matter - tear us apart.  Our great nation has endured for nearly 250 years, and we will endure past this election, whether Trump or Kamala wins.  Don't fall for the hyperbole that "democracy is on the ballot," That is utter nonsense.  Everyone take a deep breath.  I am, however, very much concerned by the unwillingness of people with disparate ideological perspectives to converse civilly with each other. Political division can, sadly, be our country's death knell. But only if we let it... We must make a concerted effort to see the humanity in everyone, from the MAGA hat-wearing Trumper, to the pro-Kamala, liberal Democrat. Even the Zionist waving the flag of Israel must, at some point, see the good in the student protestor donning her watermelon pin and keffiyeh.  All of this may seem radical, utopian, and naive, but I don't care. If we cannot treat each other with love and grace, we will ...
Read more

Loneliness v. Solitude

By -
Image
  It is important that we do not conflate loneliness and solitude; while the former connotes a sense of yearning and discontent, the latter describes a much-needed time of introspection and recombobulation.  A good communitarian will strike a healthy balance between extroversion and self-reflection. Without ample time to engage in solitude, we deprive ourselves of essential cognitive development. Before we express our outward-facing selves to others in the realm of civil society, we must first work to better understand and enhance our inner-beings. While the practice of solitude may seem simplistic, it can actually be quite arduous, requiring the self to, at times, drift into boredom and embrace that boredom as a naturally-occurring and integral component of being happily alone.  Sherry Turkle - in her important book, Reclaiming Conversation - writes that, "children can't develop the capacity for solitude if they don't have the experience of being 'bored' and then...
Read more