Holy shit what a nightmare idea.
when I read Shakespeare in college, the book had footnotes explaining history, context, language, and that was helpful. Rewriting it in full modern English would be weird. Using an AI to do it would be tragic.
With a lot of text, the point isn’t just “this is what happened”.
This reminds me of that guy who was trying to sell people on AI produced music, who was like “no one likes making music.”.
As a former high school student, it would have been so much easier to survive literature class if LLMs were a thing at the time. I hated the books we had to read so much, I barely read any of them, because they were so far from the types of books I liked to read and the archaic language making it even worse.
“I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
-Hayao Miyazaki
Sadly, the globe has been against teachers for a while now. They used to state (maybe still do) that their editorial board supports charter schools which, in MA, actively take money away from public schools and then often send “difficult” students back to the public schools and keep the money for the year. Then, as Boston charter schools were being reported for questionable actions towards students, the globe was nowhere to be seen.
Gonna be honest and maybe not a popular take, but reading the article I feel like the author is taking the wrong vent here. (Idk Boston Globe so could just be like another commenter said they’re trying to piss on teachers, but I’m going to take good faith here as dumb as that probably is). This reads like someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about teaching and is an avid reader doing the Principle Skinner no it’s the children who are wrong meme.
Going to cover a couple thoughts, I apologize if I don’t have them ordered well. First off there’s always been “tell me what the text is saying so I don’t have to read it”. Sparknotes was the go-to when I was in school for example. You can decry AI, but all that shit was there with sparknotes too. I did try using it once or twice for books I hated cause all my classmates were and holy fuck did it miss the mark, I didn’t even find it useful for the tests cause they’d be about the writing itself and sparknotes was just about what happened and some prominent metaphors. To give an example one class we read The Scarlet Letter in highschool, I hated the fuck out of this book. I only read a few chapters and then synopsed the rest on wikipedia, majority of my classmates did sparknotes entirely. I scored higher than them on tests cause I read enough to understand the writing style and all they could say was what happened and not the whys or hows of it or why specific descriptions were given and what those descriptions meant besides “innocence” or “guilt”, they really could not discuss the book at all. So this isn’t an AI thing. Like we’d go over a chapter we’d supposed to have read and I didn’t even read it cause I only read the first few and we’d get asked why the priest guy was whipping himself and my sparknotes classmates would say guilt. Me who only heard for the first time he whipped himself in this chapter was able to say religious guilt and sin, that he is failing in the eyes of society and his god and can never make up for what he’s done and has to whip these bad thoughts in the eyes of both out of himself, oppress himself to conform, etc etc like they actually read more about the chapter than me, but only got a “what happened and here’s the theme” with no critical thinking. So AI is just the latest version with just about as much vetting (I feel really confident it’s just cannibalizing sparknotes too lol). (Please don’t debate my The Scarlet Letter accuracy with me if I don’t have this entirely right it’s been 20 years and damn did I hate this book lol it’s just an example)
Secondly I don’t feel this covers how outdated the curriculum can be. I did Shakespeare in highschool and holy fuck it was horrible. I had read a lot of 1700/1800s originally published books at that point (not personal interest, just class divide in my town where I got placed in the “poor” school and that was the library lol) so it was not a struggle for me. But we spent a whole semester on a book with word and syntax notes for Romeo and Juliet cause it’s obviously not modern English and the rest of the class was just translating. We basically spent every class translating 1-2 pages at best. To me this is a holdover from Shakespeare’s own time where it ACTUALLY had a point. Like Elizabeth II translating Cicero from Latin was a) to teach her Latin and b) his discourse (as I understand, not his actual politics, but his lawyer technique, kind of like a light debate class). This was not what we were doing. It was just reading a “classic” for tradition and the teacher had to spend a shitload of time translating the class through it. The reason given was to learn his poetry structures, but while I’m not a poetry person I have to believe there are more modern language poets who use/d it that don’t require a whole semester spent on straight translation just so the class can understand the words, how they’re pronounced to fit into the structure and the general syntax for the time. Shakespeare absolutely deserves to be taught, but when you’re that far removed from modern language K-12 is not the place because you can’t engage in the point of learning what he has to teach in a timely manner, you’re basically teaching half a language. My English class in high school had way more discussions about Cyrano de Bergerac and its themes because everyone could follow the language (and honestly this was great cause a lot of people had dating experiences to compare being teenagers whereas Romeo and Juliet we spent so much time to translate we didn’t get that discussion). The amount of people who have English as a second language aside, it’s not helping anyone to have to learn a new form of English in a semester when your purpose is something else entirely.
Thirdly SAT (and ACT? Dunno didn’t take that one and been a while since I was in k-12, but think that’s the other one) has a reading comprehension test, not a “did you understand the art of writing here” test. Which I do think is kind of fair cause work wise the amount of times I’ve been asked to identify a metaphor or simile is 0 lol (I know there’s jobs where that’s important, but my experience is they’re the minority). But everything is informed by those tests so if the course focus is going to be on comprehension over writing style I don’t agree with this article’s take. We are in a system to teach to the test (I may be wrong, but I feel like this would be generally everywhere cause the test is what matters, like in school for healthcare even though I had patient care techniques from work for how to discuss with the patient in an understandable and accessible manner, I couldn’t use them because the test required I use confusing technical terms I would never ACTUALLY use with a patient to show my knowledge like I’m not going to say ambulate to a patient when they would understand walk better). So you may say here yeah comprehension and the test is what matters or you may say the point is to teach the art of writing in which case the test should be reworked (idk I might be forgetting and SAT did have a poetry section, but fill in the blank Y is like X is is a whole world different from read this and what is the theme, what was the motifs, etc; if I’m totally misremembering or it’s changed and there is some in-depth writing style testing I apologize lol would still stand by k-12 stick to modern language cause teachers only have so much time with students).
I am not an educational professional so idk might be way off the mark here, but as a reader who did have to walk my classmates through a lot of shit (absolutely no fault of theirs, they read too, they just had money for Harry Potter and I didn’t lol) this article just rankles me.
What’s the point of teaching literature if they are gonna use AI to make it easier to comprehend?
Everyday my soul dies a little.
