Imagine we are at the early stages of the agricultural era. People live in communities close to the lands they cultivate and they have started using technologies that differ from those used in their Hunter-Gatherer days. Let’s also imagine that there are some primitive schools that teach students how to survive in this new era of human condition. We can surmise that the curriculum would put more emphasis on how to till the ground, how to sow and harvest, how to watch for the changes in the seasons, and how to follow patterns of rain, drought, and flooding. It’s also likely that this curriculum would put less emphasis on how to hunt animals and gather edible plants and fruits.
If there were such a primitive school system, we can imagine the protests from those who were still fond of their hunting-gathering lifestyle. They would claim that the new education put people at the peril of losing skills that had kept them alive for millennia of years. And that the new curriculum did not respect the old culture and lifestyle.
The tension between new and old educational content and purpose came to my mind as I was reading “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. The author laments the fact that even students who attend top colleges come unprepared to read whole books from the field of humanities. It is not that the students are weak in reading comprehension. What they rather lack is the will and patience to read. This, according to the author, is the result of our new digital world where our attention is contested by a myriad of news outlets and social media.
What this essay brings forth is the tension created when changes in technology and the socio-economic environment affect the content and purpose of education. Currently, the study of humanities is in retreat as students and colleges place greater emphasis on turning education into a stepping stone to professional careers. Fewer students major in the Liberal Arts and Sciences now and as The Atlantic essay argues the teaching of humanities is being diluted in order to match the students’ preferred ways to studying.
Since ancient times, the study of humanities and to a lesser degree that of math and science had been at the center of education. The purpose was to give students a well-rounded education that would prepare them for public life and service. For the Medieval Church education served to prepare church leaders and to defend its dogmatic theology. In the newly founded United States, John Adams believed that the purpose of education was to prepare students to function as citizens of a democratic nation. But the ultimate goal of the study of humanities has been to cultivate an appreciation about human creativity, what it tries to tell us about ourselves and others, and to nurture further exploration of the human condition.
Starting toward the end of the last century, the purpose and content of education again entered a period of redefinition. Professional fields in technology and business required more formal and specialized study. Just getting a solid Liberal Arts and Science education was no longer sufficient to prepare students for such professional careers. Thus, the emphasis shifted to the study of STEM fields (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), business, and the health industry professions. The main victim of this professionalization of education has been the study of Humanities.
Technology also has had a very profound effect on learning. Students no longer have to be the depositories of information and knowledge nor do they have to develop the cognitive capabilities that process knowledge and information. All that can now be outsourced to machines and increasingly to Artificial Intelligence algorithms. We have been gradually surrendering the learning task to machines and we have already started to surrender the creative task as well. In the much-discussed play McNeal, the playwright Ayad Akhtar has his main character lean on AI to produce a novel.
So how should we approach the content and purpose of education? I believe an answer can be found in our nature as creatures of biology and meaning. That is, along the way of our evolutionary process, we found an advantage in instilling life with meaning. It is in art, stories, and ideas we find answers to the question “What it means to be human.” The answers to this question come in the works of literature, art, and thought produced by fellow humans from diverse places, times, and circumstances. It is in our life’s chosen meaning that we find personal agency and a measure of autonomy. In the pursuit of meaning both, freedom to produce different versions of meaning and freedom to study them are thus essential.
Therefore, the question I think we owe to ask is “Will we keep our humanity if we surrender these freedoms?” Up to now the threat of extinguishing these freedoms came from authoritarian secular and theocratic regimes. Now, however, the threat is also coming from intelligent machines to which we may outsource the production of meaning as well as its dissemination. Should this happen, humans run the risk of becoming creatures without the capacity to express the human experience in all its diversity. That’s how the diverse expressions of meaning we have today will start to collapse and our minds will eventually close. The ultimate point would be the Singularity* of the human mind.
By that I mean that just as before the cosmological Big Bang all had collapsed in one singular point, the same way our diverse emotions, sentiments, and thoughts may never escape from the Singularity of mind. It is an apocalyptic scenario but worth keeping it in mind.
*Singularity is a possibility often discussed in relation to AI. Most often, it is defined as that point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and humans no longer have control and agency over their affairs. Here I use singularity as the point when what it means to be human collapses into one meaning set by a dominant AI algorithm.
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