If you want to fight AI, just ask why.
In education, it’s an unkept secret, a drop between instrumental learning and relational understanding.
Here’s where someone with a masters would demonstrate their qualifications by grinding everything to a halt in order to define their thesis, terms and how they apply to what is being presented.
I don’t have a masters.
Also, I trust you have a brain. You don’t need hand-holding or exposition that lessens your agency as a reader. It’s more fun that way. The clues are all here, keep up:
SO … I was never a good student.
In the 1980s, in 2nd grade, we were taught cursive. The teacher often used the words, “print” and “write” to distinguish the two styles of script. Finishing one lesson, she asked the class if we had questions. I shyly raised my hand, then asked why we called cursive “writing.” I asked her if printing was still “writing.” I was confused why we called them both writing but didn’t call cursive printing. I didn’t want to get it wrong. I struggled over this question for days before summoning the courage to ask. I could barely articulate it. I was 8. She bristled. Her face turned bright red and she snapped, “Because that’s how it is! Because I said so!”
Months later, on my report card, touchingly, she remembered. In big, red, capital letters, she applauded my insightful mind, turning the marker in her hand to print in extra wide letters, “DOESN’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING AND PRINTING!!!”
I wish I saved it. I’d frame it. At the time it almost burnt my fingers to touch.
Later, in 4th grade, my teacher wrote every missed assignment on the chalk board, under each student’s name. This tactic motivated most to erase their names from the board but I grew used to it. I know it was the 4th grade because my assignments took up a full fourth of the board.
It’s not that I didn’t feel shame like the other kids, just that I had grown numb to it. I expected it. By the end of the quarter, my 50-75 assignments were permanent stains on the slate of the board. You couldn’t fully erase them. Their ghostly imprints bled into the current lessons. Whatever those were …
I basically flunked 4th grade. I moved on to 5th grade because my parents were too embarrassed to hold me back. Because of my poor performance, I was held back from almost every recess. I was left alone, expected to complete, what? 50 assignments—in order to go outside?
(Just to punctuate this, the teacher often got carried away and extended a 15-minute recess into a half-hour, or hour, or sometimes a 2-hour recess. It was a break for them too. Yeah, in the 80s, they were coasting.)
So, there I was. Just living in that quiet space.
Little did the other kids understand, or little did I understand, as I unknowingly stumbled into my subterfuge—all we had to do to escape the teacher’s authority, was to defy it.
In summary, I was systematically numbed to my instrumental learning and punished by any attempt toward relational understanding. What I did get—was absurdity.
I learned, if you didn’t do your homework, you were rewarded with an unsupervised, empty classroom … for hours at a time, to do whatever you wanted, as long as you did it before the class returned.
I wasn’t going to attempt to climb my academic Everest. With the time-management skills of a 9-year-old, completing 1 out of 50 assignments wasn’t going to make a dent.
Was I going to sit and let my mind atrophy? Or let the quiet of an empty classroom close around me and crush my little 4th grader body?
No. I had pencils. I had paper. I had … a human brain. Turns out, that’s more than enough to play with.
That’s what I applied myself to. And that’s what I’ve applied myself to, ever since, bypassing the whole experience that was intended for me.
I didn’t learn how to be an actual student until much later, in college. Even then, the expectation had more instrumental learning than relational understanding. Even in literature and other more subjective classes. If you veered away from a regurgitation of the instructor’s notes, you needed to write a damn good, syllabus-defying paper—or get used to B’s and C’s.
I got used to B’s and C’s.
Even when I tried to turn the knobs and push the buttons sticking out of the professor’s lectures, I wasn’t good at it. My mind wanted to lean into my own voice and into my own perspective on the work. Everything else felt disingenuous. There was a voice in the back of my head, asking, “how does repeating the lecture demonstrate I understand this?” The hedge always went something like: “Write it in your own words.” Ok. So, write what you said, but in my own words … I guess that’s a little better … still boring AF. It’s also coded, to me, in a very “ripe for subjugation” kind of way.
Do you study something to see what someone else expects you to study about it? To parrot their notes on the topic?
All through my academic “career,” I naively thought absorbing and articulating information through my individual voice and thought process was what was expected of me. I was wrong. That was the façade.
Maybe they do it differently now? Maybe our horrifically underfunded system of education has exponentially evolved. Oh! That’s why the cost of tuition has skyrocketed ….
Enter AI.
Who has your knobs and buttons now~?
This whole journey happened between the 1980s, and into the early 2000s. You know what those B papers I wrote had? Authenticity.
Did I take some wild swings? Maybe. (There’s an argument that that’s how you learn.)
Could a professor read my papers and see they were not written by AI? Absolutely.
Turns out, AI THRIVES at imitation. Part of my downfall, I believe, is that I did not.
AI personifies, in the least person-oriented way, the type of learning our system of education has been riding for decades: instrumental learning.
If you thought this was a diary entry, bemoaning my upbringing …. Ha! You were only partially right! (:
The reason I’ve laid all of this out: I think we’ve failed ourselves with instrumental learning. The reason AI is such a problem, now, in many ways, is our dependence on this method. On not finding our own voices, on the regurgitation of whatever framework or process we’ve been fed.
I’m saying that’s bad.
From my personal experience, we’ve never been as concerned about the context of a subject as we have been at figuring out how that subject is coded.
The reason generative AI is such a threat is that it imitates these frameworks and processes extremely well. It makes instrumental learning obsolete.
We’ve been teaching ourselves to be little computers that twitch and salivate over translations rather than our own authentic interpretation.
Human beings were never meant to be vending machines for knowledge.
The real weapon we should use against generative AI is obvious. It’s the question: Why? It’s relational understanding. It’s asking why.
It’s what we were always pretending to learn in the first place. Just in actuality, not in the simulacrums we’ve strained to hold, over many decades of institutional perversion.
Stop making the thing you’re studying look good on paper.
Search for what is authentic in one simple, three letter word … written or printed.
Just ask why.
(You can do it with something as objective as math. Yes, the equation points to something concrete at its end but where does that then lead? What trajectory are we taking?)
When a student gives a definitive answer, they’re not learning any more. The engagement is over.
We’ve been putting far too much emphasis on answers … like they’re the little bows on the gift that is our student’s education. It’s pretty.
But what’s inside the box? It’s the mystery. It’s the reason we wrap gifts in the first place.
Don’t end on something definitive. End on a question. Curiosity is the pursuit. Asking why is the answer.
In the 80s, in that quiet void, I had all sorts of questions in my little head. Many never got answered. It was the furthest away from instrumental learning I got. That was where I came alive. My learning never stopped. I learned more in that empty classroom than I ever did when it was full.