A couple of years ago we were all terribly concerned about the fact that a lot of American high schools are assigning such crushing homework loads that some kids literally don't have enough time to eat or sleep (and all this in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence that assigning homework actually improves academic outcomes at the pre-university level), but now we're hearing stories about those same schools struggling to stop kids from using ChatGPT to write their essays and suddenly It's The Children Who Are Wrong. Like, do you think maybe there's a certain level of cause and effect in play here?
"Okay, but what if both are bad" see, I don't think any framing that implicitly puts the school administration that thinks it's reasonable to assign thirty hours of homework per week and the student who has to choose between writing an essay the old-fashioned way and getting more than two hours of sleep tonight on equal ethical footing is productive.
Honestly, if you spend several decades complaining that public schools aren't teaching critical thinking or basic civics but are instead just conditioning people to do mindless obedient work, and then a tool pops up that cannot reproduce critical thinking but is very efficient and effective at mindless work, and everyone immediately jumps on it as a solution to doing well in school, isn't that incredibly validating? Why get mad at the kids for proving you right?
