> What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read to demonstrate they can read Shakespeare? A staple of modern education is scaffolding learning

We definitely need to rethink some assumptions.

I view education as serving at least two goals: one is job-specific training (eg you will go on to do an English Lit PhD) and the other is proving you can do sit in a chair for long enough to do a job, and do critical thinking (you will graduate and get a “degree required” job).

I think we are mostly worried about how the death of the essay affects the latter. In some sense what you are studying is irrelevant for this case, what is important going forward is developing critical reasoning skills _in partnership with AI_.

Not claiming to have solved this, but some ideas would be:

- ask students to produce way more papers, but now you are an editor checking for high level understanding and catching falsehoods/errors. - stop asking students to write essays, instead offer them simulated conversations with AI experts where they need to display knowledge to keep up (eg “Art Museum Curator Simulator”), or tutoring kids from lower years. - stop asking people to do 4 year degrees and use AI to give much better apprenticeships for the real work (this might be my favorite).

> we should give students a stake in learning what they need to learn.

I strongly agree with this one, I think for many people the college degree has fallen victim to Goodheart’s law. Trade schools might actually be better but it took ZIRP to create those for software engineering.

> LLMs seem to be in that vein

My opinion is that even if capabilities halted now, LLMs would be more economically valuable than the internet (compared over the same 50 year trajectory). And I predict that they will not halt any time soon.

Maybe this yields more resources to invest in education like the OP author, and we end up more enriched than ever before:

> I teach at a small liberal-arts college, and I often joke that a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut. My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale.

The only thing I’m confident about is volatility, the range of outcomes is wide.