¶As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem – tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.

¶Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students – and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.

¶(emphasis added)

¶I find this quite encouraging and exciting to think about. AI has had, and will continue to have, enormous impacts on education. We’ve heard plenty about the negative side of that equation - students using AI to cheat, the “effortless A”, schools having to use AI to detect cheating by AI, etc. But positive impacts of AI on education are real and this article helped me realize that some of the positive impacts are still on the horizon and truly might be enormous in scope.

¶I never really thought about it until reading this opinion piece, but it’s true that a lot of our education system is mercenary in nature, at least in the United States. It’s designed to support each student’s efforts to build skills that will help them in their chosen field of work. What happens if that purpose of education is diminished or disappears entirely? Could the oft-spoken but rarely embodied “lifetime love of learning” actually became a focus of education at all levels? Imagine the absolute explosion in human knowledge and sharing of knowledge that could come from that.

¶I’m going to be thinking about this one for a bit.

¶I made a beeline for Arlington Row, the achingly beautiful line of cottages that are one of Bibury’s most striking features. Sadly, the occupants of all those cars were already there. Despite hanging around for an hour, I was unable to get a pedestrian-free shot of Arlington Row. In the end, I settled for the least-busy shots I could find.

¶We made a day trip to Bibury during a trip to London last year. It was nuts. So nuts that I remember feeling guilty as we left town. Earlier, as we walked around town, my feelings had gone from wonder (it truly is beautiful) to disappointment as I realized, like the author here did, that I was not going to get a tourist-free photograph of Arlington Row. Then guilt arrived as we walked back to our coach. We watched other tourists walk every which way, largely ignoring sidewalks and even fences around yards. We stayed on designated paths, of course, but many people didn’t and that was a direct result of the number of tourists that had arrived that day. The sidewalks couldn’t contain them, which is a problem, and bigger sidewalks are not the solution.