S.A. Dance makes a good case for true education, on the second anniversary of the release of ChatGPT, the ‘artificial intelligence’ software – which is in essence just an algorithm collating the repertoire of the collective knowledge of humans. As Dunce puts it: Two years ago, on November 30, OpenAI made their text generator software ChatGPT available to the public. On December 1, millions of students across the world stopped doing their homework.
Ultimately, as Dance points out, education is not about what one might produce or do with knowledge, but what that knowledge does to us: That is, make us more virtuous, or less so, or even vicious. The purpose of ‘leisure’ – making space for contemplation of the higher truths – is the essence of a classic, liberal arts education. For those who want to cheat, and let AI do all the work, well, there’s only so much teachers can do. At the end of the day, virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment. Only the truth, sought for its own sake, can set us free.