Sometimes when people ask me what I do, I mention that I’m a writer. When this happens, I usually get questions about the kind of writing I do or where I see myself going with it. But last spring, when I said offhandedly to a friend’s husband that I write poetry, his first question was “Have you thought about using AI for that?”
I was a little taken aback, but recounting the story to my friends later, I laughed. “Writing is the point,” I said. “Does he get that writers write because they like it?”
A few months later, after I had started teaching, someone told me that my high school students are probably all using ChatGPT to write their essays. With some hesitation, I responded, “Well, I know how each of them thinks pretty well by now. I think I’d catch it if anything switched.”
Then, during a conversation with a college professor, I asked what I could do to get my students ready for the next step. Teach them to write strong essays? To be ready to dive into difficult texts? He replied, “I’d take students who could read more than a paragraph and understand what was going on.”
My first reaction to all of these incidents was confusion. After all, I only graduated from college myself a year ago. Two years ago, my classmates and I were joking about artificial intelligence in college settings—“Hey, did you hear there are kids who need ChatGPT to write their papers for them?”—and professors were mentioning new programs that could detect AI usage. Now it suddenly seems like AI is everywhere, and everyone has an opinion about it.
“AI is changing everything,” “AI is changing nothing,” “We have to learn how to use it,” “We have to learn how to stop students from using it,” “Nobody can read or write anymore,” “Reading and writing can be outsourced to AI without much changing”—and on and on, such a volley of different opinions that you feel, in Tennyson’s words, “stormed at with shot and shell.”
Meanwhile, it’s hard for me to understand how, one year after receiving my cap and gown, people could be writing doomsday pieces about an educational landscape that looks so different from my own experience as a student. I was just there, I keep thinking. And it wasn’t like that.
Granted, I went to a small Christian liberal arts college, which meant that my peers and I made up a self-selecting group of students. Still, during prospective student weekends, we emphasized things like our discussion-based model or affordable tuition. We didn’t tell prospective parents and high schoolers, “Our students actually read and write here,” because that would’ve seemed, well, obvious. What distinguished us were the kinds of things we read and wrote, not the mere fact that we did so.
But things have changed fast. People in Christian and secular circles have pointed out how college and high school students now struggle to focus in class, lack basic reading comprehension skills, and churn out most of their assignments with ChatGPT. With younger students, teachers are talking about how hard it is to teach kids who have “tech tantrums” when they can’t have access to devices or who simply can’t focus enough to retain information.
Put simply, the way things are now just isn’t working.
Even in my own life, I’ve noticed a shift and can sympathize with the struggle to focus. “The written word is weak,” writes Annie Dillard. “Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect.”
In the past year, I’ve had difficulty maintaining those subtler senses. It’s been difficult to reach for a novel instead of my phone. To prioritize conversation with friends in real life over witty quips online. To sit down with pen and paper and write something without feeling like I’m fighting to pull each slow thought to the surface of my mind and yank it into articulate speech.
Reading and writing in the digital age, I’ve realized, are just hard. But we aren’t turning to blood-quickening real life instead; we’re turning to the digital world of the smartphone and social media, and now, to artificial intelligence.
Even a year or two ago, I found both life and literature more enthralling. When I was a college student, I got excited about stuff all the time, whether it was assigned readings, writing papers, or class discussions. If anyone had suggested using AI to summarize my readings or generate a paper, I would’ve asked, “Where’s the fun in doing it that way?”
I used to think that was just my personality. But as I’ve been fighting to keep that excitement sharp and close at hand, it’s dawned on me that so much of my delight in learning stems from my circumstances.
I was raised in a home where books were everything, and I started reading at the age of four. In my mind, there have always been books, and not just first readers but proper “grown-up” chapter books. Both of my parents read aloud to us, Mom in the morning and Dad before bed. We read classics, philosophy, poetry, and books on natural science. Books—and their corollaries, writing and logic—defined my high school years.
By the time I left for college, I had read Aristotle, Dante, Milton, and Melville; I was familiar with Kant, Nietzsche, and Descartes; I’d studied Horace, Virgil, and Caesar in the original Latin; I’d been through most of Shakespeare’s plays, knew my logical forms and fallacies, and had written papers arguing with George Berkeley (over universals) and T. S. Eliot (over Hamlet). Whatever Christians or non-Christians mean by an educational revival, I could have been their poster child.
But now, a year out from my own graduation, I’ve found myself asking all the same questions as everyone else about how to keep up my own reading life but also about how AI is changing the landscape of teaching. What is education for? What do new technologies say about education and about those of us who use or don’t use them? What’s the good that we’re moving toward—a world where we turn the tools of writing over to our machines?
Sometimes I feel a little like Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail, when her then-boyfriend Frank Navasky tells her that she is “a lone reed, standing tall, waving boldly in the corrupt sands of commerce.” I’m trying to stick up for the written word over the big bad Fox Books of AI, but sometimes I catch myself asking, What’s the point? And more importantly, what do I actually think is worth pursuing?
America is caught in a conversation about what it means to be human. It’s an old conversation, but one that the internet age has intensified. From Tiktok filters to chatbot followers, those of us who grew up online are constantly asking, What’s real? What’s not real? What’s human?
I’m in the middle of the conversation myself. As I’ve tried to articulate my own thoughts on education, I keep coming back to the clarity of my parents’ vision. They seemed to have decided what they wanted for us and pursued it, years before the classical Christian education revival became as widespread as it is now.
I sat down with my mom and asked her, “Why did you educate us like this? What inspired you?”
Two things, she told me. First: Books. She talked about Little Women and said, “I knew Jo was interesting because she read books. So I decided that in order to be an interesting person, you had to be well-read.”
She talked about growing up in a house full of books, how both her parents believed in being self-learners, always reading history or theology on their own. “Staying up late was encouraged,” she said, “As long as we were reading.”
She was a latchkey kid in small-town Nebraska, and she and my aunt would bike all over town during the summer. I thought of my own memories of summers at Grandma’s house, of my cousins and I running across the street to climb the trees outside the high school or walking to the dollar store on our own, wrapped in the summer heat and the smell of cattle.
“Books and real things,” my mom said. “That’s what I had as a kid. So I think I always knew that’s what children need.”
In Poetic Knowledge, James S. Taylor says that education “introduce[s] the young to reality through delight.” Education itself puts us in contact with reality, our minds and bodies involved with the real world.
If technology is going to play a role in education, we need to frame it in light of this principle. If it puts us in contact with reality, it can stay; if it widens a gap between the real world and our minds or bodies, we should think twice before giving it too much power.
But too often, our approach to education in the 21st century is like our approach to everything else, whether streaming movies or shopping on Amazon or swiping right on dating apps. It’s a consumer mindset. We want things easy and fast, and we want the best possible product. Education becomes another click-and-swipe system where we hope that putting a kid in a desk at “the right school” (or at home) will produce a super-child, “a child who can change the world.”
“A lot of people get anxious about their kids,” my mom said. “But educator Charlotte Mason would say, ‘Mothers need to have a thinking love.’” In other words, parents—and teachers, and those of us who are cultivating our own literary lives—can’t abdicate our choices to whatever click-swipe system, hoping for a perfect product. It’s not enough to just want fast and easy; we need to have this thinking love. A truly human education invites students to know for themselves.
Later, I thought back over my mom’s advice and sketched a few principles on my piece of paper. Walk to the dollar store in the heat. Read books out loud. Make your home or classroom a hearth for ideas. Find stories that resonate with you and live into them.
It’s not a perfect solution, and it won’t guarantee perfect students. Rather, it’s an attempt to try and live out Taylor’s idea, to introduce and reintroduce ourselves to reality through delight. Insofar as I’m able, I’ve decided, I won’t allow things into my classroom—or my own life—that undercut that delight in reality. No gaps between mind and body and the beautiful world.
There’s another quote from Charlotte Mason that I heard often when I was growing up:
The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? And about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? And, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?
This is the goal of a truly human education: that you care about a large order of things, because this is what it means to be human. It means learning to know things for ourselves and to appreciate these subtler senses: the moral sense, the intellect, the beauty of literature.
It means falling in love with life, which “gets your blood going,” without any gaps between ourselves and the world. It means wonder. Most of all, it means love.
Olivia Marstall is an essayist and poet who has been published in Veritas Journal and The Clayjar Review. She also teaches humanities at a classical school and has begun an MFA through the University of St. Thomas. Read more of her writing on literature, attentiveness, or the spiritual life at her Substack, A Stream of Words.
