What schools are doing in relation to technology varies considerably by location. Some schools and school divisions are embracing technology, while others, including some here in Manitoba, are shunning it in favor of traditional systems and approaches to learning. Even within those two extremes, there is considerable variation in how technology is being approached and implemented.

What stands out to me is the contrast between how schools are approaching technology and how the workforce is approaching technology. Computers are on most desks now. Many offices have some form of chat or messaging capability between employees. AI is increasingly being used to help automate tasks and simplify processes.

Then we go into a school.

The classroom may have few, if any, computers in it. The computer lab is still down the hall and treated the same as the library, an optional, extra activity that comes after schoolwork is complete. Or, if technology is in the classroom, it does nothing more than turn a paper-based activity into a computer-based one.

Computer skills are a necessary part of many jobs now. Without them, many employers won't even consider you, while some teachers in divisions where technology is not widely accepted or used still haven't learned how to turn on a laptop without help. That's a stark contrast.

There is a general belief that when students go home, they are using technology enough that they don't need more of it in school. But there's a problem with that logic. Texting your friends and playing video games does not teach you critical thinking, spreadsheets, workplace email etiquette, general computer use, typing with more than two thumbs, or responsible AI usage. It doesn't teach you how to work with a mouse, navigate Windows or Mac OS, have a video call, use Word to type a document, and so on.

Exposure to technology at home is not the same as learning to use technology effectively in the workplace.

If the purpose of education is to give students the knowledge and skills they need to determine how they want to live, then we are doing our students a disservice by not actually preparing them to use the technology that surrounds them in the outside world. Shunning technology at school or not adequately teaching it undermines that purpose, reducing education to little more than dispensing knowledge we hope will be useful someday.

There are digital literacy skills that can be taught from kindergarten to Grade 8. Early, age-appropriate introductions to technology help to set expectations, provide foundational skills that can be built upon in later grades, and offer additional teaching methods that aren't available using traditional pen-and-paper approaches.

I am not suggesting that we put laptops on every desk starting in kindergarten and move school exclusively to the digital world. I am suggesting that we need to prioritize teaching appropriate usage and critical thinking. To teach appropriate usage, access has to be available more of the time, not just when the teacher decides to take their class to the computer lab.

I understand that devices can be a distraction, forcing teachers to spend considerable time getting students to pay attention to their lessons. That's actually a two-fold problem. First, lessons need to be engaging to keep students' attention. Simply managing the environment by banning devices doesn't guarantee they'll pay attention. Second, learning to manage those distractions is part of appropriate usage, and it should be taught directly in the classroom.

If schools establish appropriate usage policies from kindergarten, and all teachers enforce and model those same policies themselves, over time the school can create a natural, technology-friendly environment.

How do policies around not running in the hall get established and enforced? It's because all teachers enforce the same rules. Those same strategies apply to technology.

Schools don't ban walking because students sometimes run. They teach students when and how to move appropriately. The same thing can be created with technology.

Technology has to change what we teach, which means age-appropriate, responsible usage and critical thinking need to be included in the curriculum, not just in theoretical discussions at the high school level, but starting in kindergarten.

Critical thinking needs to be taught as a transferable skill, practised across subjects, and applied to the kinds of information students actually encounter, including AI-generated responses.

Critical thinking is not just spotting incorrect information, although that's part of it. It includes examining evidence, reasoning, context, and whether conclusions are justified. It's also about learning to critically evaluate information by challenging the assumptions being made.

Students need to do this not just with printed articles in the classroom, but also online, in real time, while engaging with AI output or other material they come across.

In order for that to happen, teachers need to be trained as well. Teacher education does not generally prepare teachers to teach technology unless they specialize in the subject area. Teachers need to understand how to use technology effectively and appropriately themselves, which means they need opportunities to develop and practise the same competencies they're expected to teach. That will require substantial professional development throughout the profession.

Teaching students to use technology prepares them for the world as it exists. Rethinking what we teach prepares them for the world as it's changing.

We can't keep pretending that students are not surrounded by technology when they leave school every day, or that computers aren't an integral part of the modern workforce, or that AI isn't becoming increasingly prevalent in workplaces.

In some ways, this brings us back to a more fundamental question about what the role of education actually is.

Is job readiness still a foundational part of school?

High schools continue to prepare students for college or university by asking them to choose between university entrance courses and non-university entrance courses. We continue to ask teenagers to make critical life choices about their futures.

If job readiness is no longer part of the K–12 education system, then why are we asking teenagers to make educational pathway decisions that can affect their future opportunities? Perhaps there should be one academic track for everybody that focuses on foundational life skills and a more general education.

If job readiness is going to continue to play a role in high school education, then we need to make sure schools are teaching current technology with an eye towards what might come next.

We can't continue to pretend that the world hasn't changed.

We don't have 20 years to conduct research before writing new curricula, training teachers, and bringing education into the 21st century. Research is important, but it doesn't mean we have to postpone teaching the technology skills students already need while we investigate what comes next.

How many more students need to graduate without an appropriate technology education before we fix the problem?

Discuss...

We've changed how we teach students to arrive at answers in math. We emphasize number sense and conceptual understanding rather than relying exclusively on memorized procedures. We've introduced different approaches to literacy instruction, writing frameworks, reading strategies, and assessment.

But how often do we step back and question the purpose of the content itself?

When was the last time we looked at the math curriculum and questioned whether everybody really needs to know trigonometry and advanced algebra? When was the last time we questioned whether being able to write poetry was a necessary skill for everybody?

It's not that these skills aren't valuable. Writing poetry is a great interest subject, and there is absolutely cultural and historical value in exposing kids to poetry. There is definitely a future engineer who needs trigonometry and geometry.

But are we being fair to students by expecting them to decide whether they need those things at 14, 15, or 16 years old?

We already have different academic pathways that allow students to choose which subjects they want to pursue in greater depth. But those choices come with consequences. A student who decides at 14 that advanced math isn't for them may discover at 25 that they want to become an engineer. Suddenly, they need to go back and acquire the prerequisites they didn't know they would need.

Why are we expecting teenagers to make educational decisions that can create barriers well into adulthood?

And if we take away the pressure of deciding future careers from teenagers, how does that influence what we teach those same teenagers? What would high school look like if its primary purpose were to expose students to different subjects, skills, and interests rather than sort them into future educational and career pathways?

How do we design a system that doesn't punish a 20-something for not knowing they wanted to be an engineer at 14?

There is another question we need to ask: How much of what we teach, and what we've stopped teaching, is determined by educational value, and how much is determined by administrative convenience?

Part of my role as a tutor is enrichment for kids whose parents feel they need a challenge. Not everything I teach is remediation.

I have one student whose parent has requested that I teach deeper thinking because much of the writing the student is doing in school involves stating an opinion and backing it up with a fact or two from a book or article.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that type of assignment. It teaches students to support their ideas with evidence.

But there's a difference between identifying evidence and examining what that evidence actually means.

We can ask students to make deeper inferences, question why an author included a particular scene, consider why something was written a certain way, or explore whether there are other reasonable interpretations of the same text.

Is it a problem if students aren't being asked to do those things? That depends on what we're actually trying to teach.

If we're teaching critical thinking, then being able to question meaning, make inferences, and examine different interpretations matters. If we're only checking for basic comprehension, then forming an opinion and backing it up with evidence from the text may be sufficient.

The purpose of the learning matters beyond the stated outcome.

And that brings us back to how curriculum is organized.

Teachers have limited instructional time and an enormous number of outcomes to address. They are often expected to combine multiple skills into single assignments, assess numerous outcomes, and demonstrate that the required curriculum has been covered.

Integrating skills isn't necessarily a problem. In fact, it can be excellent teaching when students understand how different skills and concepts work together.

But when the pressure to cover curriculum outweighs the time available to teach it meaningfully, we risk creating assignments that serve administrative requirements more effectively than they serve students.

Some skills are taught in isolation with no meaningful connection to anything else students are learning. Other skills may receive less attention because they take too much time to teach or assess properly. And sometimes we combine so many outcomes into a single assignment that it becomes difficult to determine what the student actually understands.

What if we approached curriculum differently?

What if we started by identifying what students should ultimately understand and be able to do, then worked backward to determine which knowledge and skills actually contribute to those goals?

We could examine which skills everyone needs to function independently, which skills develop over many years, and which subjects are better suited to exploration and specialization.

We could also question whether every student needs to demonstrate learning in exactly the same way, or whether the method of demonstrating understanding should depend on the skill we're actually assessing.

None of this means abandoning foundational knowledge, memorization, or traditional assignments. It means understanding why we're using them and whether they're accomplishing what we intended.

If bureaucracy, time constraints, and the pressure to cover every outcome are influencing what gets taught, what gets dropped, and how students are assessed, then perhaps we're losing sight of the larger purpose of education.

We spend an enormous amount of time asking how to teach the curriculum more effectively.

Maybe we need to spend considerably more time asking what belongs in the curriculum in the first place, and why.

Discuss...

After probably 75 000 messages over two years or so, there are no more em dashes or phrases using the word “gently” in the output. ChatGPT now closely mimics my voice and how I talk. It turns out, you can make the em dashes go away without repeatedly prompting for it. Context and history play an important role in how AI responds to you.

Why did I use AI to write the framework? Because I wanted an a-moral, non-emotional, reasonably neutral framework that explained cause and effect independently of human story and perception. I used AI to help examine situations logically and question the assumptions behind them.

A simple example was a tree falling on my house. How does human perception work in that situation? What is actually true? What is potentially true? What is mostly human perception? What are the possible outcomes? What is the person reacting to? Perception or reality? I also used historical references. Given what we know about what happened, was the outcome logical within the context of the framework? Plug the World Wars into it. Does it make sense? I did this with ChatGPT and every other model I had access to. I'd feed their outputs back into ChatGPT, too. I wanted the AIs to break each other's logic. Agreement between models wasn’t enough. I wanted to understand whether the explanation held up and where it fell apart.

Across thousands and thousands of messages, with a lot of iteration, discussion, questioning and back and forth, I ended up with the framework I wanted.

Through that process, I learned a lot about prompting and getting AI to produce what I needed. I also began to understand the limitations of different models and which were more suited to working within a morally neutral framework. Some repeatedly brought moral framing back into hypothetical and historical discussions. Others produced output that was more machine readable than human readable, making them difficult to work with.

Now, ChatGPT is Grammarly with a personality. It's really good at cleaning up my writing after I write something. But I didn't get that from a good prompt. I got that from extensive history and context.

AI in writing is frustrating on a cold AI. You get the standard output format, complete with em dashes and “gentle” phrasing. That was true for me in the beginning, too. It took a long time to get ChatGPT out of therapy mode and get it to stop dragging morality back into things. But with enough effort, you can get customized output that closely reflects how you talk and follows how you think.

The average user isn't going to work that hard. I get that. I also believe that over time through training, the standard AI output will improve. For now though, persistence and time are the fixes that make AI output more helpful than not.

That’s not to say that AI is infallible. It does make mistakes. It is not perfect. You have to be willing to question its reasoning, point out the mistakes, and do the work.

From my perspective ChatGPT and any AI, can help to carry some of the mental load of organizing thoughts and generally structuring your writing. It can also help you find holes in your own thinking, show you where there might be a gap in your writing, or provide additional prompts that would add value to your work.

I understand that there are people out there that will simply prompt the AI, copy the output, and paste it as though they wrote it. When photocopiers were first available publicly, I’m sure somebody spent time photocopying entire books. Frankly, you can still check out a book from the public library or even buy it at the store, take it home and scan every page if you really want, and then bring it back. AI doesn’t change that, it just exposes that the possibility to make an electronic copy of something and repurpose, reorganize, or repackage it has been around for a long time.

Technology in general has changed how we function as a society. Music artists are having to figure out streaming. How do you make money in a world where everything is downloaded and records or CD’s are not the primary medium for sales? Artists were always at risk for theft. How many of us spent time listening to the radio with a blank cassette tape in the boom box ready to record a song when it came on?

Theft got easier, but we never actually resolved the reason for the underlying theft. Why did we record songs off the radio? Why do people try to find music for free? Why would somebody photocopy an entire book or take a book home, scan it, and return it? What is the underlying reason for that? Solve the original problem instead of just trying to put enough obstacles in the way to prevent it.

Why do people try to find things for free? What parts of society make that necessary and how do we resolve them? The flaw is in the function of society itself, not necessarily the individual people. Money or lack of it is what makes this necessary for some. How do we provide access to things for free as a means of limiting theft, while still making sure creators are paid for their content and the value of that content is respected? We can find ways to make sure creators get paid, it’s only a question of who is paying. Technology and AI expose this problem because they make putting obstacles in the way more challenging.

Why does somebody generate every single social media post using AI? When sheer numbers of posts become algorithmically more important than less frequent authentic posting, it means we’re serving the larger system of social media. Social media is “full” in some respects and that means that to be seen it requires an individual to become a content factory to hopefully float to the top.

Having a post go viral without needing to post 12 times a day 7 days a week, is like winning the social media lottery. It’s impossible to predict. Without a guarantee of that occurring, people naturally default to what they believe works, which is just sheer volume. Unless you can afford to pay somebody to follow you around with a camera all day and then post it for you, you’re probably not posting enough to float to the top on most platforms. Are there exceptions? Sure because different social media sites work differently. It can be slightly easier to be seen on a platform like LinkedIn if you have content that professionals want and it can also be highly challenging to be seen on Facebook where most pages simply fall out of sight immediately. By making AI produce content, you get the chance at visibility without taking on a second or third full time job. The system creates that through its own structure. The environment we have now is a direct result of the environment we came from.

We used to live in a pay to play world. Visibility was expensive and only a handful could be seen. You no longer have to pay to play. Technology levelled the playing field while also exposing the original exclusivity problem. Now if I’m a really good writer or musician that’s on par with or better than somebody who has a major contract, I can gain exposure through social media. I don’t have to pay thousands for vanity publishing, I can pay $20 for an AI subscription that can write social media content for me based on the content of the book or the lines of the song I give it. It doesn’t guarantee success but it lowers the cost of the ability to at least participate in the process in a meaningful way.

The original system was great for those who managed to find their way in, but it also left out a lot of people with dreams and good work of their own. Eventually technology brings the gates down and people bust their way onto the scene that would never have otherwise had the opportunity. But that’s not the fault of AI. Once again, that’s the old system creating a false barrier to success and visibility through money alone.

The amount of attention available is finite. There are still a limited number of people that want the work being produced. Lowered barriers to visibility don’t change the fact that visibility is still limited by the number of people available to see the content. That’s not system created, that’s just a function of life.

What we have gained though is choice. If I don’t want to buy from a big chain, I can find a locally owned shop. If I no longer want to support major record labels, I can support people that don’t have a record label. Choice allows the attention to move away from large corporations and back to the individual artist.

Visibility is what allows the attention to move and that’s where social media plays a distinct role. It makes clearer why AI created content has become a reality. People are vying for attention in a world of limited attention, most of them without multi-million dollar budgets. In my view, giving more attention to independent artists is a natural rebalancing of power that is long overdue. That’s the part that technology creates that the old system could never accomplish.

We put a lot of time into creating barriers to access and far less time exploring why we need those barriers in the first place. There are many discussions still to be had about the role of technology and AI in society. But one thing is clear: we need to move the conversation away from trying to prevent the technology from existing and towards changing the conditions that make people feel they need it to game the system.

Discuss...

Back in 2004, are these the same kids who would have tried to find an essay online? In 1985, are these the kids who would have asked a friend to write the essay for them, or simply copied someone else’s?

If yes, then the problem isn’t AI. The problem is the essay. Whether the issue is the student’s inability to write it or their complete disinterest in it, the outcome is the same: they aren’t going to write the essay.

What has changed is that now they can hand something in. Before AI, it was easier to identify the problem. They handed in nothing, copied something, or produced work that clearly wasn’t theirs. Now AI gives them a way around the assignment that is much harder to spot.

The problem hasn’t changed though. It has just become easier for students to solve. And I don’t think most schools are addressing the real question: How do we get kids to write essays who would not normally write them?

To answer that, we have to start by asking why we are having students write essays at all. If the goal is simply regurgitation of facts, it’s boring. If the goal is to manufacture an opinion on something the student does not care about, that is also boring. If the student legitimately does not have the skills to write the essay, then our job is to provide the support they need, whether they ask for that support or not.

Not every student wants to be a writer. Some students genuinely struggle to put words on paper. If a student cannot or will not write a five-page essay, can they write one strong paragraph and complete the rest of the task another way? Can we give them choices? Why are we still so attached to everybody completing the same assignment in the same way?

We understand the value of differentiated instruction. We understand the value of choice and independence in learning. Providing more lateral movement within an assignment gives students who struggle with one part another way to demonstrate what they know.

What is the point of the assignment? Is it to see whether students can write five pages? Or is it to demonstrate knowledge? If it’s the latter, there are plenty of ways to do that without requiring students to write an essay. If the answer is the former, then we need to question what we’re teaching and why.

Unless you’re a writer, where in ordinary life do you ever write five pages of anything? Essay writing is not generally a day-to-day functional skill. It is an academic skill. Because it is primarily an academic skill, and because the underlying goal of many assignments is supposed to be assessing learning, there is no reason to treat the five-page essay as the default method of assessment in what should be a general education environment like high school.

What if students need essay writing in university or college? Then the responsibility should partly fall on universities and colleges to teach the form required within their programs. The foundational skills of writing sentences, paragraphs, arguments, explanations, and organized ideas belong in grade school. Those are useful everywhere. The larger academic form of the essay can be developed further in post-secondary education when a particular program actually requires it. Grade school education needs to focus on general knowledge and function.

What do students need to know to operate as human beings in the world? Think about the things you do in a normal day outside your profession. Those are the kinds of skills students need to develop in school: budgeting, understanding income tax, scientific inquiry, critical thinking, reading a map, communicating clearly, evaluating information, and solving ordinary problems.

High school is still heavily shaped around preparing students for post-secondary education, even though many students may never attend. Gone are the days when getting a general degree simply because university was considered the automatic next step made sense for everyone.

My own view is that post-secondary education is most clearly necessary when a profession requires specific certification, licensing, or specialized knowledge. There can absolutely be value in interest-based study, business education, the humanities, and other forms of learning, but that is different from treating university or college as the default destination for every student.

We also seem unusually attached to struggle in education. We want students to push through difficulty because we have decided that struggle itself prepares them for life. Sometimes we even make school harder than it needs to be because we believe the struggle has value. But struggle only has meaning when the person struggling believes the outcome is worth reaching.

People are usually as strong as they need to be. Part of choosing to push through difficulty is deciding whether the problem matters enough to justify the effort. For many teenagers staring at a five-page high school essay, that assignment probably ranks fairly low on the list of problems they believe are worth conquering.

When forcing them through the struggle fails, some of them will turn to AI to do it for them. Then our response as teachers and parents is to ban the AI instead of changing the problem, providing better support, or questioning why forcing them through the struggle did not work in the first place. With enough scaffolding, support, and instruction, students can learn to write. I teach kids to write every day. Support is the solution, not force or prohibiting AI.

And if support is difficult because teachers are overwhelmed, classes are too large, and workloads are unreasonable, that is a different problem entirely. The solution is likely an overhaul of the education system in a way that most people would find terrifying.

For now, though, we need to stop blaming AI for exposing problems we have had for years and never really intended to deal with in the first place. AI did not create the problem. Our avoidance of the underlying issue did. We have to come to terms with what kids can and need to do as part of a general education, and then build around that.

Stop trying to manufacture struggle and win a fight that this technologically forward generation is simply not going to engage in when they see no value in it.

Discuss...

The part we struggle with in schools is what we tell kids they need to know. If it's interesting to them, they'll learn it anyway. If it fills a meaningful purpose, they'll probably learn it anyway. But just because the curriculum says so is a much harder thing to convince a student to go along with.

For the most part, the content that gets taught in schools has not meaningfully changed over time. We have changed emphasis, language, sequencing, outcomes, and sometimes the tools students use. We have added things like digital literacy, Indigenous perspectives, media literacy, coding, financial literacy, and more explicit attention to critical thinking. But the core academic structure is quite stable: reading, writing, arithmetic, science, social studies/history, and then progressively more specialized versions of the same subjects.

Kindergarten through Grade 8 is generally where foundational skills are taught. While I absolutely believe that there is room to question what we're teaching and why at those levels too, I think there is a far more profound change that needs to be made at the high school level.

High school is where we need to seriously question how easy access to information has changed what we teach and why we teach it. If the student is using AI to write the 500-word history essay for them, the question is why?

It's easy to just say they are lazy. But if we go back in time, who were the kids that traditionally didn't write essays or had somebody write it for them? Why was that happening then? We never actually fixed the underlying problem. Now that it's getting easier to get the essay written, the problem is just more obvious.

Does the student have the skills to successfully write the essay themselves to begin with? Is the student just not interested in the topic and therefore wants to avoid the essay? How do we resolve boredom in the classroom? How do we make sure kids have the skills or have access to the help that they need to be successful in the classroom?

One problem calls for instruction, scaffolding, practice, and support. The other calls for reconsidering the task itself, the topic, the purpose, the audience, or how much choice the student has.

What is the purpose of the essay? Regurgitation is boring. Writing for the sake of writing is also boring. Checking a box on a list of outcomes may be meaningful to you as the teacher, but has no value to the student.

What is the value to the student in learning the information? If the information is easily accessible anytime, anywhere, then we have to question how that affects a student's desire to learn, write about, or memorize the information.

Why is this being taught? Nice to know? Needed to function as an adult in the world? Somebody decided it was important in 1980 because walking to the library was inconvenient?

There are things worth knowing even when the information is easily accessible because knowledge provides context, judgment, cultural literacy, pattern recognition, and the ability to evaluate new information. You cannot critically assess everything from a completely empty head. But that still does not justify every fact currently sitting in every curriculum.

It's time to reconsider the value and importance of the information we're teaching. As technology makes it easier for students to avoid assignments, schools have the difficult job of determining what's still important and what's not, while finding ways to keep students engaged in a world where information is increasingly cheap.

Why is information cheap?

Easy access to anything makes it less expensive. That works in retail. It works in manufacturing. Mass-produced anything is generally cheaper. The Internet and AI have made information something that is mass-produced.

It’s not a question of whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It simply is, and that’s the part we just have to get okay with. We can’t go back to the world where information was hard to get. That’s like trying to convince people that we should stop streaming and go back to 8-track tapes and Walkmans. It’s not going to fly. The nostalgia will continue to exist, but the world has forever changed.

So how do we renegotiate learning and education around cheap, mass-produced information? Or how do we convince kids that cheap doesn’t mean unimportant?

A can of beans is cheap, but that doesn’t make food unimportant. A pair of socks can be cheap, but it doesn’t make clothing unimportant. The two things can coexist. It also provides a useful lens. What parts of the curriculum are still important even though the information itself may be easy to get?

Our individual valuation of importance is not what matters. If you don’t like beans, it doesn’t matter that they are cheap; you’re not going to buy them anyway. But that doesn’t mean nobody else likes them or needs them. A love of a given subject or topic doesn’t necessarily mean the information is more or less valuable or needed by anybody else.

In my opinion, there are specific criteria for determining what makes information important.

• Do I need the information to function as an adult? Is it going to help me order food, budget, find a place to live, or be successful in a career I may not have chosen yet?
• Does it help me critically assess new information I come across?
• Does it expose me to new ideas, opinions, or interests?
• Is it something I’m already interested in?
• How likely am I to need that information in the near future? What is the likelihood that in 5 or 10 years I will forget that I ever learned the information because I never used it?

We can all think of plenty of topics in the curriculum that we never used again outside of the classroom we learned it in. That matters in a world where information is easy to get because it increases the likelihood that students will use AI to get around the assignments. They already know, as we did when we were their age, that the information would be of little value in the long run.

“When am I ever going to use this?” is one of the most valuable questions we can ask when determining what information matters in education and what doesn’t. “I might need it in university or college” isn’t good enough anymore. Post-secondary institutions have an obligation to teach the skills that are not important until that specific degree/diploma/certificate is wanted or needed. That information includes a certain amount of high school history/social studies, math, language arts, and science.

We can no longer assume that a student will graduate high school, choose a career, and stay on that path for the next 40 years. Kids often graduate high school with no idea of what they will do with their lives. I tell my own kids to make a 5-year plan. They just need to be doing something. It doesn’t have to be permanent. If they try enough things, eventually the breadcrumb trail leads to a possible long-term career option that makes new knowledge valuable.

High school needs to lead from that same place. Expose kids to as much information as we can without requiring them to memorize and regurgitate all of it. Teach for interest. Teach for a love of learning instead of mastery of every subject area, and then let students decide what they want to continue learning about.

All information can have value, even information we aren't particularly interested in. The interests students already have are valuable too. We can build on them. But not if we're stuck teaching something that happened 100 years ago simply because “everybody needs to know the history of our country.” That isn't enough of a reason on its own. In fact, it may be a very good reason for a disengaged student to get AI to write the essay.

That doesn't mean history isn't important. It means history needs to be learned in context and without the inflated valuation we sometimes give it simply because it has traditionally been part of the curriculum.

Yes, it's important. But not knowing a particular historical fact probably isn't going to dramatically change the course of most students' lives either. Both things can be true. And we need to be able to hold both ideas at once when deciding what students genuinely need to know in a world where information gets cheaper and easier to access every day.

Discuss...