Originally Posted April 19, 2024
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. – Plato, Phaedrus (275)
This week, a topic that seems to be a repeating theme in my practice of teaching and consulting is the question of thinking. I keep hearing from faculty members that writing is thinking. As a result, their students’ ability to use generative large language models to create writing that mimics thinking threatens them.
The written word dominates our world, but it is not synonymous with thinking. Much of great thinking is not written, and too much writing contains very little thought. AI may be a threat to thoughtless writing, but it’s not a threat to thinking.
Plato argued that writing was going to destroy thinking. He wasn’t wrong. Even in ancient Greece, it democratized our ability to express ourselves, but, as King Thamus points out, that came as the cost of memory and rigor. Our ability to memorize epic poems has declined since then. Arguably, his prognostications of people using writing “to appear wise” have also borne out.
The invention of writing was not the last time technology democratized our ability to share our thinking. Gutenberg’s press prompted similar outcries as the invention of writing itself. We have heard criticisms like this again over the last few decades as writing became a digitized medium.
The digital revolution has given us all printing presses and has created a proliferation of all forms of reading and writing. This abundance has created a side effect of mediocrity. Any wag can be a pamphleteer if they have a printing press. Everyone has a printing press these days.
The reaction of the establishment was the creation of education and sets of standards that separated writing from the unwashed masses. The written word became the coin of the realm in higher education through the process of publish or perish.
This has had the unfortunate side effect of making even scholarly writing a commodity. As the educational culture forced more and more people to publish for extrinsic reasons, such as to keep their jobs, the quality of the thinking declined. Add to that financial pressure to bias research and the result is a lot of bad “scholarly thinking” that just happens to be written and passes through the peer review process.
The latest iteration of this is the discovery that people are writing scholarly works, and even books, by generating them with chat bots. Writing is no more immune to a race to the bottom than any other creative pursuit. Generative large language models do an admirable job of mimicking thoughtless writing, even in academia. They’re only going to get better at it.
As writing has become more and more ubiquitous, the limitations of thinking skills become more and more obvious. Quantity does not equal quality.
So why are we so obsessed with teaching our students to write rather than focusing on their ability to think? Writing is a quantifiable measure. One reason is extrinsic: Requiring students to write X number of words or pages for a class is something that is easy to measure. Measuring thinking is much harder.
After 20 years of teaching, I can say that quantity does not equal quality. When writing was the only way in which my students could express their thinking, this was a trade-off I had to live with. Of course, even 20 years ago, I couldn’t tell whether a student, or a sibling or parent had written the work they were turning in. Therefore, I could never be sure who was doing the thinking.
The “solution” that some have fallen back on is making more manual, in-class, writing assignments. But what is that teaching? I think with many aids these days, including using AI at various stages. When teachers limit students to pencil and paper, this creates a false environment that in no way reflects the kinds of thinking skills they will need in the real world of today.
Yes, we need to train our students to communicate their thinking effectively. However, we also must accept that no one communicates without technology.
Good thinkers use a variety of tools to create. I didn’t go to the library to write this blog. I used Google. I used AI-powered grammar checkers that help me avoid bad writing habits (which don’t like the fact that I used “I” to start five sentences in a row). I even used ChatGPT to see if my prose was telling the story that I wanted to tell. I shared my thoughts on LinkedIn, not a scholarly journal. Are those uses of technology cheating?
The days of oral poetry are thousands of years in the past. Technology will enter the picture somewhere. As Plato implies, writing itself is a technology. However, teachers and academics overlook that digital technology has opened the doors to a range of complementary technologies ranging from webpages to concept maps to comics to photography, and many more.
When we focus on writing as the only technology, we miss the potential for understanding different ways of thinking. Text drives narrative in certain directions. It leads to over-specialization and the fetishization of narrow slivers of knowledge. It is also something that machines like generative AI find easy to mimic even in the iterations we are using today.
Over the last 40 years, we have opened doors to new ways of expressing our thinking that the educational community has largely ignored. Artificial intelligence, which I prefer to call “augmented” intelligence, augments our ability to think as well as communicate in unprecedented ways. When we don’t teach learners to think in an AI world, we are doing them an immense disservice.
Instead, we should structure our educational experiences to incorporate every tool we can lay our hands on instead of insulating our students from change. If our educational systems don’t do this, society will find replacements for them. The graduates that we produce will be the actual victims here. We need thinkers more than ever today.
Generative AI can be a partner in understanding what our students are thinking. It reduces the friction between thought and narrative. I have found it an invaluable tool for gaining insight into what my students are thinking in real time. This alone makes it far more powerful than any paper or essay they could write.
Technology provides us with tools we can use to figure out what others are thinking. When we fetishize writing, we confuse means with ends. Writing is a means. Thinking is the end. We should teach thinking and use every technological tool we can find to achieve that end. To achieve this, it’s time to stop worrying about protecting the means of getting there because that’s what we’re used to and lean forward in our teaching strategies.