I certainly don't oppose reforming contemporary education, but at the same time, letting it be replaced by something else by default because that thing has exponentially more engagement power invokes Chesterton's Fence. I'm not sure we even know what we're giving up.
Chesterton could certainly not predict the exponential growth in access to tooling and knowledge. And we're only at the start of the curve.
In my opinion we should go back to absolute basics. Forget grades. Focus on health, language, critical thinking, tool usage, and creativity. Skills that are intrinsic to humans.
Make sure education is fun with lots of play. The main advantage humans have over computers is empathy and creativity. I'm not sure AI will ever "get it".
Provide each student to the extent possible a path to follow their own curiosity and talents. Advanced maths, programming, writing, chemistry, physics, etc available for those interested, even at a young age.
But the baseline education should focus on learning the absolute minimum to survive and otherwise maximize fun, creativity, and empathy.
Writing forces me to organize my thoughts, summarize, elaborate, reference other parts of the text, iterate until the pure essence is clear, remove redundancies, and this cements the concepts in my mind.
Merely reading, or worse, hearing, or worse copy/pasting something is only the first part of learning.
It's similar with programming but I would take it even further. I never really understand complicated code until I've written tests and run the debugger and been very close to it.
An AI chat bot is a powerful tool, but if you just use it to generate assignments you won't learn much. Inevitably it will be used both well and poorly and the results will be mixed.
How do you get to that conclusion? I find that if I have a text editor, I can write my thoughts down and then visually put them in order or encase them in a more general concept with ease, which I couldn't do when writing on paper.
But I've noticed that many many many people report the same effect, that there's something about pen-and-paper writing that's more effective for thought-lubrication. I resisted for a long time, but now I too am a convert to this school of thought.
Similarly almost everyone notices the downside: it's easier to reorder, reorganize, cross-link, etc, those thoughts, in a text editor (to say nothing of more sophisticated software tools). Some people have systems for doing complicated things with paper that they say mitigates this downside, but I am not currently one of them.
I guess it's possible that your brain just doesn't have this pattern in it. (That is, the pattern of finding pen-and-paper more effective for getting the thoughts to flow.) I mean, for all I know, maybe the huge silent majority doesn't have this pattern.
But writing enables arrows, lines, crossing-out, small-text notes, circling, variable pressure, colour, etc. Richer than ordering/indenting text. Also higher contrast.
Some of it may be just ... overload your brain so it cannot think of anything else ..so you stay focussed for lack of choice.
In my personal experience, a helpful feature of pen and paper is that it is less effective than keyboards, it takes me more time and focus to write things down. Maybe this gives the rest of my brain more time to catch up and understand the things that I am writing.
Written text is also less efficient when it comes to searching. This forces me to organize my thoughts better because I know I won't be able to CTRL+F random keywords later.
I don't write code on paper for (probably) obvious reasons, and I tend to write essays in a text editor although I also enjoy the act of writing on paper in that situation.
Personally, I find while the computer provides powerful writing tools, it also provides powerful distractions.
Maybe you get notifications you just quickly want to check, that slack message from the boss could be urgent. Maybe you decide to just check you're using that obscure word right, or to research a detail for your writing and an hour you haven't written the number of pages you set as your goal. Or maybe sitting in your netflix-watching chair looking at your netflix-watching screen just doesn't put you in the right mindset.
I remember my mother once doing the opposite: she wrote a long letter on the computer, so she could edit and re-write until she was happy with it, then printed it out and copied it by hand, for the personal touch of a hand-written letter (a peacemaking letter to a relative).
If you cannot organize your thoughts, explain your reasoning, etc. then you’re not going to get very far leveraging an LLM. Sure, it’ll spit out a book report, but unless you can explain — in well-structured writing - what you’re looking for, you’re not going to get what you need for the vast majority of writing assignments.
I suffered through writing classes for years and it made me hate writing.
It was only when I started journaling that I started liking it, and liking that I got better at it.
Is it worth making students better at writing if it means as adults they'll not want to write again?
Organizing and arguing your own thought would be a good test. I think an assisting tool could still be reasonable - choosing between different organizations. Though it's unclear how to assess for original thought - the only such "essays" I know of are PhD theses.
People said similar about log tables and slide rules. And they were right - something was lost (e.g. the sense of nearby solutions). Yet here we are.