… [The] word “education,” which is derived from the Latin educare, literally translated as “to bring out of” or “to lead forth.” Therefore when we educate people, if we use the word seriously, we do not stuff something new into their minds; rather, we lead this something out of them; we bring it forth from the unconscious into their awareness. They were the possessors of that knowledge all along.
—Dr. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
This book was published in 1978, almost five decades ago, but it is even more relevant today. Since then, high school education has become an exercise in standardized test taking, college has transformed into an expensive box to check, and education itself has been intentionally devalued by those who want to replace intelligent, well-informed thinkers with people who will follow their agenda. (Whichever side of the aisle you sit on, this is true.)
And now into that maelstrom comes AI to upend both how education is delivered and how it is perceived. After all, if you can spend four years having AI write papers for you, what does a degree even mean anymore? It still means something to me, as I explained in a recent post on why I don’t and won’t use AI.
Education is supposed to be a journey in which you are a traveler, not a tourist. It is supposed to challenge you with things you’ve never seen and ideas you’ve never heard so you can become more than who you were and yet, at the same time, make you more of who you were when you started. As T. S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Last week: Douglas Adams says eff it.
Next week: Eric Idle gets loquaciously bombastic.
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