[staunton]

The reason it's done is to teach students how to think. By writing down their thoughts they are forced to think about a topic. It's the same reason small children are still taught arithmetic although we have calculators.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice students learn that "really thinking for themselves" in essays is usually not rewarded while paraphrasing some reading assignments with some sprinkled quotations works much better and is less work than thinking about topics they don't care about.

Maybe the AI stuff will lead to practice better approximating the theoretical goal.