In this day and age, when students google and copy whatever AI tells them from the prompt they put in, getting students to attempt their own thoughts becomes harder than ever. Creating a common sense of reference, likewise proves difficult.
Teaching high schoolers about story structure, I cannot rely on them to know associations that even ten years ago, would have been common place. They do not know Phineas and Ferb or Shrek or even The Avengers Endgame. They’ve not seen Lord of the Rings or the sequels or any of the Harry Potter movies, much less read the books.
Many I teach shrug their shoulders when I ask, “What’s your favorite movie?” seeking to find a reference I can hook the lessons to. One admitted, they don’t watch television or movies, and that leaves me with they scroll. That’s it.
Imagine channel surfing perpetually, never resting, never listening, never stopping. That’s what scrolling does. Listly going from one place to the next, desiring story, desiring connection, and never finding it because story, like life, takes place over time. It must unfold.
The google generation doesn’t know story, and that’s different from all generations before, even those that never had books. They told stories. They shared them over a fire. They memorized the stories, they shared them with generations, for generations.
The modern world, the phone, the internet, AI, all of the technology at our fingertips, changes how a person processes information, and it disconnects story continunity from the experience. So when one describes the Hero’s journey, they don’t have all of the moments from the Tik Toks, or Instagram versions they’ve seen. All the wells are puddles, masquarading as oceans. People post that they understand things more, but the more they propose as understanding, hasn’t been fact checked or vetted, it’s just their observation presented as truth.
Knowledge is built, fact by fact, story by story, just as books are written word by word.
However, with knowledge and story now instantly created, the reality of knowing, the importance of the journey in a story, and of creating itself, have been devalued. I know AI is useful, I also know google is useful. I also know, we have as a people, to a person, never done well with limiting ourself and embracing the struggle required in learning. We have seasons of willingness and of unwillingness.
AI, like google search, facilitates and enables the unwilling to go on unlearning.
To be fully human, we must connect, we must create, and we must create connections through our creations. We need art, music, story, sport, philosophy, love, friendship and play. We need all the things through all the mediums and methods that AI cannot do, not because people cannot use AI that way, but because they are disciplines which at their core, require a pouring out of the soul, the risk of vulnerability, of being incorrect or rejected. We need to teach our students, our children, ourselves, that the struggle itself, is worthy, more worthy than the answers we might google in an instant.
How we teach that to an instantcart gratified world, I do not know.
The theory of moderation didn’t take and it was proposed back when Aristotle reflected on the nature and importance of knowing. What I do know is, our society will be poorer for every answer we aquire cheaply, because the lessons won’t be learned even if the kids all score 100 on every test.
If we do not help the future generations learn to read and retain stories for their own sake,
we will fail at understanding either our past or our present, and wander listessly into a future dominated by machines we neither control or understand, managed by those who do.
So I know what I’m doing with my students going forward. We’re going to read stories, lots of stories, and hope each one, each story, helps each of my students fall in love with the struggle itself.
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