AI, Teaching, and My Students - Part One

It was before Covid hit, and I was teaching my Enlightenment Colloquium for junior English majors, when my students first brought up AI as a problem. Not that they were using it yet. We had yet to have ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot popping up unasked on our screens.

Our class had been reading eighteenth-century texts about the “Enlightenment,” Kant’s insistence that one dare to use reason and to be an adult, not a child, under “tutelage.” Before Kant there was Francis Bacon, the so-called father of the “new philosophy,” or new science, based on observation, experiments, using instruments/tools, not relying on the wisdom or authorities of the past. After him was Newton. The glorification of reason, what “man” can accomplish. John Milton, writing in “Areopagitica” (1644) argued that individuals, created by God with reason and free will, have the responsibility to think for themselves, to question, rather than follow, custom, to be active (not passive), seek truth, needing to distinguish between perfection and error, even if it is difficult. This is the work and goal of education, as we call it, the development of critical thinking

One of my thoughtful students brought up AI. She feared it, did not like that it might think for us, take over our lives. They feared the loss of control, a surrender of agency and autonomy---the very things they were fighting to have at the age of twenty. The class of twelve students were all of the same mind. All were English majors. Some were also pre-medicine, or had double majors, but not one of them thought the prospect of AI was liberating.

Now, here we are seven or eight years later. Colleges, students, and educators are living in a different world. The world according to AI. A prestigious press published a book that turned out to have (to their surprise?) been written by AI. A brilliant former student, teaching as she works on her Ph.D, tells me it has become increasingly hard to catch an AI-written student paper since AI can now be adjusted to sound more like the student, more natural.

Inside Higher Ed published an article about the Brown University economics professor who allowed his class to do a take-home midterm, only to find that most of them had used AI, and so, had the same answers. When he then told the class that the final would be in class (not a take home), many of his students immediately dropped the class. And an article in The Atlantic, “Bring Back the Blue Book,” extols its virtues. This August, The New York Times published, “AI Agents are Taking Entire Online Courses for Students.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how education has changed, starting in kindergarten. An extension of our tech/screen obsession has created fertile ground for what I consider cheating, but may feel natural to young people, who as babies, have grown up with screens and a technology that might be fun (sometimes useful) but makes us passive receivers of things, as well as isolated, rather than social.

I just read a wonderful article in The Washington Post (Aug 4, 2026—“What elementary schools are slowly learning about screens”) on how tech has invaded elementary classrooms. 80% of school districts now issue devices to kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. Interactions are with screens and tech rather than each other. What I call the dehumanization of learning—a process that the changes the brain. It seems related to the decline in reading and literature (see the The Atlantic essay describing our descent into a new dark age where books and reading do not matter). And even among much older “readers,” many of them prefer audio-books (again, too passive an experience for me).

Given these changes in education our students have been experiencing, is it any wonder they gravitate to generative AI? It probably feels normal (not like cheating), and merely an extension of what they’ve been taught to experience . . . and how to learn!

Brave new world, indeed.