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This might be a case where AI in teaching and easy availability of electronic texts might actually help the humanities. Grade the reading level of 1000s of texts, allow students to choose from among any of those thousands of texts that are age and grade-appropriate, and have AI develop custom course materials for that book and support the teacher’s grading process. No teacher, or even school system, has the resources to develop materials for every possible good book, nor necessarily to be able to grade the relevant homework (at least at HS level). AI could. The teacher role would include review and adjustment of a student’s chosen syllabus for breadth and depth. (“Not everything has to be written by Brontë, Amy.”) Students might carry that positive experience of reading what they choose into adulthood and actually read for pleasure as an adult. (Isn’t that the desired outcome?) If given the choice in school, I would have skipped novels altogether (except SF and fantasy) and read poetry anthologies and non-fiction (travel literature, religious literature, collections of popular essays, histories, Great Books, etc.) instead. The reading assignments of “sophisticated” (i.e. depressing, neurotic, middlebrow, often NYC-centric) modern novels led to me skipping the whole novel genre for leisure reading ever since, i.e. for 50+ years. Did I miss much? Side note: I was assigned dozens of essays to write in K-12, and never once was assigned an actual essay to read. Students were assigned classic essays to read in 19th and early 20th Century schools, but not in my mid 20th Century public schools. |
I recognize this as a huge problem in education and sometimes bore my colleagues with rants about it. In my field of work, we expect grad students to write a thesis/dissertation without ever having studied good examples of such.
I once asked a famous textbook author for examples of well-written dissertations in his field, so I could have students study them as models. After thinking on it, he said he couldn't come up with any, observing that students are generally poor writers. Well, I think we educators have to take some of the blame for that.