The end of the high school essay
&gt; There’s not a lot of evidence that getting good at writing book reports or regurgitated essays under typical high school conditions leads people to success or happiness later in life.<p>Possibly true, but most people never get good at writing. Or at reading, for that matter. Including college grads. Perhaps, for the ones who do, it does lead to success or happiness later in life!<p>The story with language skills isn&#x27;t all that different than math skills: most folks top out around the middle grades, or maybe early high school, and never get much better. People just treat them very differently. They&#x27;ll volunteer that they suck at math, while lots of poor readers and writers take any suggestion that they&#x27;re not good at those activities as a grave insult. &quot;Bad at math&quot; is regarded as normal, while &quot;bad at reading&quot; is considered pretty close to &quot;moron&quot;.<p>&gt; The first challenge of the essay was the asymmetrical difficulty in giving useful feedback. 30 essays, 5 minutes each, do the math. It doesn’t scale, and five minutes isn’t even close to enough time to honor the two hours you asked a student to put into the work.<p>This is true. Grading in writing classes is incredibly time-intensive, if you want to do a good job of it. It scales very poorly, as some schools and teachers discovered when they tried to put higher student loads on remote language arts teachers during Covid.<p>&gt; Students get more points for good typing and clear sentence structure than they did for actually thinking deeply, questioning the status quo or changing their minds. If you grew up in a household with verbally agile family members, you probably did way better on essays than your peers, but not due to much effort on your own.<p>Well, sure, but also grading standards can only be as rigorous as admin and parents allow them to be. Start demanding that kids get <i>actually good</i> at writing to receive good grades and you&#x27;re likely to have a bad time. Grading must be tuned so that practically all kids who show up (and many who rarely do) will pass, and a very high proportion will receive A and B grades. Rocking that boat is not usually a great career move. You&#x27;ll have admin and parents up your ass in a hurry.<p>&gt; So, now that a simple chat interface can write a better-than-mediocre essay on just about any topic for just about any high school student, what should be done?<p>&gt; The answer is simple but difficult: Switch to the Sal Khan model. Lectures at home, classes are for homework.<p>Mmm. Given the level of compliance I saw in college, when it came to reading assigned material, I&#x27;m not convinced this is a good solution to widely deploy. Or, the experience of many with remote school during Covid. It&#x27;s worth remembering that tons of strategies that work great for ideal students fall apart when applied to average or poor students. I have a feeling this would just turn into the teacher trying to cram the lesson into the first 10 minutes of class, so their classes&#x27; test scores don&#x27;t fall down to the Earth&#x27;s core.<p>&gt; In a school that’s privileged enough to have decent class sizes and devices in the classroom, challenge the students to actually discuss what they’ve read or learned.<p>That&#x27;s... just expensive prep schools. Especially the decent-class-size part. Vanishingly few public school teachers have an average class size under 15—mainly special ed, or high school teachers who are lucky enough to mostly teach &quot;smart kid&quot; electives. Most are more like 18-23, and quite a few are a lot higher. Ask any teacher and they&#x27;ll tell you class runs <i>way</i> smoother, discussions are better and the students more engaged, and they get more material covered when a large chunk of a class is out because the flu&#x27;s raging through. Ignoring all the rest of this and just cutting the average class size in half would be a huge improvement, but it&#x27;s also not going to happen. Meanwhile, yes, four- to ten-student discussion-based courses that expensive prep schools often use <i>absolutely are</i> a very good model—if you have the money.<p>&gt; At first, this is harder work for the teacher, but in fact, it’s what teachers actually signed up to do when they become teachers.<p>&gt; This is far less cohesive and controllable than the industrial model of straight rows and boring lectures.<p>This seems to assume at least better teachers, on average, and possibly more of them. Either of those means far more spending. It&#x27;s not happening.<p>&gt;  If we want to train people to take initiative, to question the arguments of others, to do the reading and to create, perhaps the best way to do that is to have them do that.<p>This is what elite prep schools already do. We know that model&#x27;s better—it didn&#x27;t suddenly become true when ChatGPT came around. Public schools just don&#x27;t have the money (or freedom to kick out highly-disruptive students) that is required to do that.<p>&gt; We’ll never again need to hire someone to write a pretty good press release, a pretty good medical report or a pretty good investor deck. Those are instant, free and the base level of mediocre. The opportunity going forward remains the same: Bringing insight and guts to interesting problems.<p>I do wonder what&#x27;s going to happen when poor readers and writers not only start judging AI writing, but their feedback (via which passages they choose to keep, if nothing else) is incorporated into the model to encourage it to produce more writing like that. I&#x27;ve known business owners who couldn&#x27;t write coherent instructions for making a peanut butter sandwich—and I mean for a normal person to follow, not the excessively-precise kind that&#x27;s sometimes used to demonstrate how computer programs work—and degree-holding managers and bureaucrats whose writing could be outdone, in terms of how well it communicates a message, by a somewhat-bright fifth grader. What kind of writing are they going to select, when they tell ChatGPT 8.0 to generate, say, marketing copy? <i>Will</i> it be &quot;pretty good&quot;?