For as long as there’s been a concept of “education,” there’s been a debate between two fundamental visions of its purpose: is it to inculcate skills and convey information, or to shape moral character and create good citizens for our great nation? You may think me mad, a philistine, naive or nihilistic when I say this: I think we'd better stick to the former, because the latter’s ridiculous and morally wrong despite the fact that it might’ve been endorsed by Plato. Plato also endorsed (on the same grounds, i.e. mind control), and during art's golden age, the total suppression of all art.
Writing in The New York Times about the bad characterological effects of AI on college students, NYU associate provost Clay Shirky makes this remark, typical in my experience of university administrators: "As educators, we have to do more than ensure that students learn things; we have to help them become new people, too." Then he says he worries more about the psychological and sociological effects of AI than the directly academic effects (for example, cheating on your history paper.)
Shirky makes this "new people" remark blandly, as though he's saying something obvious that everyone agrees about. But there are howling problems just underneath.
There was a consensus on this among college administrators and perhaps also among politicians for the whole course of my academic career (roughly 1990-2023): our task is to prepare these kids for citizenship, inculcating democratic or other political values. And our task is also to shape personalities. As central to our campus as the classroom is the counseling center. We’re here to treat your anxiety and depression and to enhance your self-esteem, help you find your real gender and affirm who you really are deep inside. And we’re here in the long run to transform our society ethically and politically, roughly in a progressive direction. Our tasks here at the U include helping our society achieve racial and gender equality, and also medicating everyone's ADHD.
How do you achieve social transformations, or where is it that we decide as a society "who we really are"? The question of who we really are is a question that The New York Times opinion page obsesses about daily, including in columns over the weekend by the late David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and Lydia Polgreen. Perhaps as Brooks ends his column it’s even occurring to him that maundering on for all these years about who we really, really are deep inside as a country didn't have any point or effect. But where we make ourselves into who we really want to be, insofar as we do, is in education, people seem to think. If we hope for a societal transformation, we must get hold of the children.
Stop. It’s the task neither of an op-ed columnist nor of a college administrator, nor of people who are both, to make New People or to tell us who we really are deep inside or to treat our dysfunctions. Let people go and see what happens. That may sound irresponsible. But the alternative is just demonstrably ridiculous and evil.
We just did 30 years of universities regarding it as their central task to move the country in a progressive direction and to cure its students' psychological dysfunctions. And we came out of that lurching into a period of screeching reaction. Putting it mildly, rates of depression and anxiety among young people haven’t gone down. Understanding of what citizenship in a democracy requires is no better than it was, and the woke era just prepared the way for a series of leftist and then rightist speech crackdowns. The constraints on discourse at Shirky's NYU and many another school, then coming from the left and now coming from the right, shaped public opinion only to the extent of polarizing it extremely between people who went to college for four years and people who didn't.
The New People made at NYU (my daughter went there in the aughts) didn't turn out to be the future, which was a lot Trumpier. It did train its students in such a way that they could never communicate with working-class people again. It trained people to take as universal and obvious truths things that people who hadn’t been remanufactured into New People just regarded as ridiculous or incomprehensible.
When college administrators make our kids into New People, they do so according to whatever may be the academic fads of the moment. At a certain point, it might be "positive psychology" and then we'll try to manipulate everyone into reporting themselves to be happy, or pill them up real good. Or "gender ideology" might sweep the faculty (it's 2015, after all) and then we're practically pressuring you to switch or "explore." Or it might be "whiteness studies" (it's 2005, maybe). And so on. No one is more a slave of fashion than the professors and administrators whom we've tasked with making your kids into New People. So there's no telling what the New People will come out spouting, next year.
Because federal grants are at stake, the New People might come out just the opposite in 2030 than in 2020. Those are the sorts of considerations that are in play in the manufacturing-humans industry. At any rate, Shirky’s worried about what AI will do to the social skills and the personalities of the people who use it. But maybe controlling that is neither possible nor desirable. I definitely don't think it's the task of a college administrator. It's definitely not the task of the faculty; I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, not in manufacturing New People.
I can convey some information about the history of philosophy, as well as about formal and informal logic, for example. Remaking you as a person, curing your dysfunctions, transforming society in what I regard this week as a positive direction: you may not know this, but you just don't want me doing that to you. For that, you'll need to turn to Claude.
People develop complexly over time, from internal and external influences. When a kid heads to college, she already exists. She has a personality, a character, values, problems. She can’t be remade, and it’s wrong to try. Try instead to allow her to develop and to remain and keep becoming herself. Arm her with knowledge rather than trying to cure her, much less her society. Not only is that evil, it’s not possible. Its consequences will primarily be unintended.
With regard to the issue Shirky is writing about: it might be a task of a college administrator to figure out how to reduce the use of AI for cheating or plagiarizing on academic work. It can't be their task to control how AI is changing their students' values or personality. I know it sounds odd or off, but I’d think of the task of the faculty as conveying information in their areas of expertise and of inculcating skills such as writing and reasoning and close reading and doing quadratic equations. Forego the mind control and the indoctrination and leave off the impossible and evil task of fabricating humans, is my advice to Shirky and anyone else involved.
Ironically enough, one way that college administrators want to make New People in this period of backlash is by banning Plato, the great advocate of molding personalities through education, because he might present a threat to the sort of sexual identities that Texas state legislators think should be created. But maybe creating your sexual identity as a trad wife or as someone who has transcended gender entirely just isn’t the job, even if teaching Plato still is.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell