The truth is that AI answers is the least of our problems. What is much bigger is the challenge to thinking. We live in a Google age in which people do not think but simply surf, do not think critically but presume anything and everything on the internet has the same value, and do not think inventively but follow the crowd even more than in previous days. AI and screens are partly responsible for the fact that if presented with a blank page, modern students would not know how to write on those pages and probably not know what to write.
Cursive represents a time when we valued thought, thoughtfulness, and practiced thought. Now we value time and ease -- do it fast and do it as easily as possible. While it may be efficient, it is hardly effective. The great gulf between students are the few who know what they are thinking and why they think it and those who simply mirror the thinking of the moment and have no clue why they should agree or disagree. Schools are partly responsible for this and classical schools are partly an answer to the current situation. While it might be felt on the collegiate level, it begins far earlier. The roots of the modern day problem were planted in screens as baby sitters, entertainment over finding your own solution to boredom, and schools weighed down with the need to correct the social ills all the while reducing the content and what is needed to master the content for matriculation to the next grade or graduation.
I continue to be amazed by the fact that nearly all our students will end up elementary, high school, and college with a very limited list of actual books they have read. A synopsis is not the same and neither is the abridged version enough. They may well know their games and the characters therein but Shakespeare and the great authors down through history are strangers to them. They do not know original sources but only what others have said about them or the equivalent of a sound bite version of their literary contributions.
It has got to start somewhere so I vote to begin the revolution with cursive. Let's teach the old Palmer Method that I learned. Let's put up the posters that display the upper and lower case forms of cursive. Let's ask our kids to write again and ask them to read more and read the whole content of the books, stories, essays, and poetry that once defined literacy. It is not enough to know how to type in a few words into a search engine. We are in desperate need of creative thinking, thoughtful reflection, and critical judgment.
2 comments:
Wonderful idea about a return to basic writing skills, reading books, and critical thinking. However, it seems that the popular culture is less interested than earlier generations. Young people today seem woefully detached from intellectual curiosity, content with AI, and the quick synopsis to replace inquisitive thinking. Perhaps, this trend in much of the Western world makes it much easier to control the narratives. It is troubling to note this lack of intellectual depth in college students and academics in particular, as their educations may seem impressive on paper, but are often superficial and didactic. Maybe it is because we are in the era of the “selfie” and tweets, and few regard critical thinking as a methodology to develop solutions to complex issues. Propaganda often replaces clarity because it appeals to emotions. Is that what many people want today? The human race may advance in terms of technology, but in social terms, it seems to take two steps forward followed by three steps back. My personal feeling is that our country is about to face a challenging political future, and I foresee violence and civil disorder on a wide scale beginning in our urban areas. Many students today not only reject cursive writing, but our form of capitalism and Constitutional freedoms. The future conflicts will be over our system of governance, with tensions between two distinct sides, socialists vs free market. The Democratic Party will continue to move Left, and socialist thinking will be the driving fuel to transform the country. Under socialist and communist thinking, dissidents are reactionaries that must be crushed, and compliance with an atheistic system mandatory. I believe civil war here is very likely, not possibly, but probable. Christians must be prepared for there is trouble ahead, but by the grace of God, we will hold to our faith. Soli Deo Gloria
One possible solution would be to require all papers to be submitted electronically with the complete edit history. I think Microsoft Word and probably most word processing apps can do this. Then the teacher can see if the student is just pasting large quantities of text.
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