It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!
It’s amazing what a good professor can get you to do and love.
I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.
I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.
If there's a revolution in work due to AI the first jobs to fall are going to be the ones that don't require any originality or critical thinking. Any number of paper-pushing middleman jobs.
These have already been tightly squeezed by automation - see the rise of the bachelors-having-barista trope who can't find a job despite their degree.
Question is, how long would it take for the idea that if you don't train yourself to put some creative effort in, the machine is gonna replace you to propagate through the world enough to change how high-schoolers and college students behave? Whether that means pushing them into tangible hands-on fields, or into more original-creation as the robots replace manual labor too...
Or if we get some sort of UBI first instead? Or Skynet?
But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.
My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.
Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.
When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.
I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.