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Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.
Will Teague on .
My 75-year-old mother went back to school this year. She’d gotten really sucked into Korean dramas on Netflix, gone full Koreaboo, and decided the best way to learn Korean was to enroll in undergrad language courses at the nation’s best university for learning exactly that. Which is basically the prelude explaining why Mum suddenly got a whole bunch of new 19-year-old friends this year. And her main takeaway from this experience?
University nowadays is fucking hard, y’all.
Mum is smart, the first in her extremely working class family to get a tertiary education, care of a then-active government scholarship program. Dad was the same, with the added stressors of being a refugee from a broken family who left home at fifteen. They both did work though uni, to pay for living expenses, but most of their stories of their time play out like a 70s comedy film, with plenty of weed and LSD and wacky hi-jinks. By the time it was my turn in tertiary education, thirty years later, the scholarships were gone, replaced by a means-tested ultra-low interest government loan system. Far more expensive than Mum and Dad’s day — and with World of Warcraft instead of drugs — and the rot had already started to creep in. We were all already middle-class, or close enough, and all knew we weren’t there to “learn” per se, so much as we were there to get a very expensive piece of paper we could trade for a job at the end of the experience. Learning things was a bonus side effect, but hardly necessary.
Fast forward to now, with Mum paying around $5k a semester and studying 40-plus hours a week, for one single class. Then looking at her friends, most of whom are international students, and who work, as well as take a full course load. “I don’t know how they manage it,” she keeps telling me. And Korean is a hard class; a lot of kids were thinking of dropping it, because they simply couldn’t afford, either literally or figuratively, the cost of failing.
This is why students use AI. Higher education is broken, in the same way our whole-ass society is broken, and kids simply can’t afford to fail. Yes, failure is a part of learning, but it’s also a luxury; one increasingly only available to the ultra-rich.
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