The frantic pace of modern life has revolutionized not only the communication landscape, but the academic landscape as well. In the epoch of smartphones and personal computers, it is all too obvious how pervasive technology is in each and every one of our lives. When generative AI and large language models, such as ChatGPT, intermingle with the existing technologies in our everyday lives, the problem is only exacerbated.
What makes this different from technological revolutions in history, be it the printing press or digital photography? Simply put, those inventions actually helped us. The early internet brought with it the naive hope of an interconnected future — a golden age of information. The entire world’s oeuvre, all we could ever want, quite literally at our fingertips. While we do have all of the information we could desire, the average American’s reading ability is at a middle school level, and only 28% of U.S. eighth graders were proficient in math as of 2024.
If we can access more information than ever before, why are we going in the wrong educational direction? Because education is being used as a means to an end. Go to elementary school so you can go to middle school; middle school so you can go to high school; high school so you can go to college and ultimately college so you can get a job. Such a taxonomy is not in itself corrosive: in a capitalist society, you do need a job. That said, if the goal of education is simply to get to the next thing, it undermines the very point of learning and actually makes it more challenging. Why retain information and think deeply about it when you could think about the least information possible to get the grade you want?
Education is not transactional. The point is not simply to regurgitate the right answer so that you can move on to the next level; viewing education as such scarily mirrors how generative AI answers the questions we pose. Thus, the humanities occupy a precarious position in today’s academic, and broader, world. Much has been said about how the humanities are being ignored because they don’t lead to high-paying jobs, which in turn leads universities to underfund them.
This is unquestionably true and a product of the aforementioned view of education as transactional, but engaging with the humanities does not require being on a college campus or in school. The broader humanities, via reading and writing, require that the information being processed are thought about earnestly. There is never just one right answer when interpreting Shakespeare or arguing who the greatest basketball player of all time is. This fundamentally prevents — in an educational setting — the notion of learning to simply move on to the next thing.
It is antithetical to think that, despite having more knowledge at our fingertips, we are not doing anything with it. If you’re still in school, college especially, take a humanities course. Make an effort to read something — a novel, poetry, philosophy, news — to slow down the breakneck pace of life we’ve become accustomed to.
