Don't bother listening to Derek Thompson's podcast "What's the Point of College"-- because neither he nor Dean David Deming-- who first encouraged AI use at Harvard and then sort of took that statement back-- have anything of real interest to say on the subject; they go over all the boilerplate stuff: school is the gym for your brain, there's a communal aspect of school that is important; it would be nice if people went for the love of learning but that's probably not true, yada yada yada . . . and while Deming makes several proposals, including having students defend their essays like thesis candidates, none of these are practical for a class of 30-50 kids . . . and neither Thompson nor Deming says aloud what I believe: reading and writing are meditative and good for our consciousness and our collective souls, and that it would be nice if we had some cultural touchstones and shared knowledge—and so if you're paying a shitload of money to send your kid to college, at this point, college should be concerned with mandatory class attendance, device free spaces, and getting kids to do the mental work they won't do on their own-- reading and writing and thinking and presenting, right there in class . . . it's the only way forward (unless perhaps you're doing engineering or some very job oriented course of study, then you're actually learning the stuff you'll use on the job-- but for the rest of the courses: history, English, psychology, sociology, political science, etcetera-- you are just learning hwow to learn, learning terms and phrases, learning how to parse difficult sentences and text, and developing the stamina and focus to read, write, and think.
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