Capitalism, AI, and Creativity

What’s New? As I read final essays and reports on final projects and final reflections, I am glad that I lean so heavily into project-based learning and reflection so my students do not feel the pressure to resort to AI.

Original: Last week included reading the final reflections of my first year writers and professional writing students as well as their final projects. In addition, I had the pleasure of diving deeply into student work produced as part of the National Writing Project’s Civic Journalism Initiative funded by the MacArthur Foundation. As we shared featured stories from the Our Towns, Our Stories collection (still in progress!) we discussed the joys and struggles the students worked through to produce their pieces. These experiences underscored for me the belief that our students need more time and space for creating and that only technology that facilitates that creation is needed in the classroom.

One of my favorite authors is Mercedes Lackey. Her stories feature magic, but the use of that magic always comes at a cost which I have often taken as an exploration of oligarchic capitalism, but lately I’ve been thinking about this metaphor as it applies to technology. Elves feature prominently in several of the worlds that Lackey builds and her elves are powerful magical beings but they are not creative beings. The elves can only copy what humans create. AI and other tech tools are not creative beings. They are thieves or facilitators. Mercedes Lackey’s elves are just one example of why I love using stories and poetry to inspire writing and thinking in my life and my classroom. If we try to discuss abortion or criminal justice the conversation will quickly devolve into predetermined divisions, but if we talk about the spark of life in the zombies in the Walking Dead universe then we can really explore the issues that matter. Maybe we need a national book club centered on Mercedes Lackey’s work? We certainly need to examine the role of creativity and technology in education and maybe that conversation would benefit from starting with elves?

We cannot solve the challenges faced by our current education system without addressing the root causes and I contend those root causes are found in the oligarchic capitalism we have allowed to flourish. Somehow we have arrived at a model of capitalism that does not solve problems or make human lives better, but instead monetizes every aspect of human life. Sarwat Jahan of the International Monetary Fund explores the four flavors of capitalism and argues for a combination of big-firm and entrepreneurial capitalism, but I think our fear and misunderstanding of socialism in this country has led us to ignore the role of state-guided capitalism to fund, to restrain, and to balance big-firm capitalism which is currently doing its best to destroy the foundations of American capitalism (entrepreneurial capitalism and the American worker). This is how we ended up with an American oligarchy. But I don’t want to get into a rant about the destruction of the United States political system and the rot at the core of our economy and politics, I want to focus on the role of capitalism in American education and how that role has become increasingly toxic. From the testing industry to big tech schools write substantial checks every year for hardware and software that does more to interfere with learning than support it. No one seems to consider the costs to both learning and humanity of this drive to buy more things to “improve” education. Now big tech wants us to layer in AI to “solve” still more of the problems that capitalism created. Today we are reading less, writing less, and our attention spans are shot thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets that make it so easy to lose ourselves in a social media rabbit hole to escape the despair caused by income inequality. We can disagree about the role of phones and income inequality in the problems facing today’s schools and students and teachers, but can we please agree that the solution to a challenge is not more hair of the dog that bit you?

I am not arguing for the removal of all technology from schools, but we do need more class time spent with old technology (paper, books, pencils, and pens) and interacting with other humans with less interference from technology. My students spend whole class periods writing by hand on paper. I direct them to put their phones away because I know well the impulse to seek solace when struggling to put words on the page. Sharing their raw writing in real time with other real humans is powerfully connective and inspiring. Filling those pages are what helps my students resist the lure of AI solutions when drafting an essay because now they have an investment in the work and ideas to explore that AI cannot fulfill. I also offer choice and reward creativity and originality over perfection. My students earn points for good faith participation on the learning journey and our final unit always includes a practical demonstration of the rhetorical skills they learned as well as an analytical reflection about that journey.

Capitalism has created the fiction of a frictionless world where we are never bored and creation is simultaneously effortless and perfect, but the truth is that bland perfection is neither interesting nor satisfying. My students and the NWP students engaged in the Our Towns, Our Stories project found tremendous satisfaction in telling their stories in their words and we need more time and space for students to engage in authentic storytelling like this. John Warner advocates for making our students scholars and I can think of no more powerful combination. Extractive technology like AI and testing should have at best a minimal role in education but we have let oligarchic capitalism have its way for too long. Our students, our teachers, and our society need more opportunities to be human which means creating imperfect messages that help us learn more about ourselves, each other, and our world. That is what it means to be human and the machines can never take that away from us. We learn from our failures and mistakes and schools need to be much more about that kind of learning – especially in the writing classroom. This is my hill.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay