Aristotle observed that we become virtuous by performing virtuous acts—that character is cultivated through practice. A similar logic applies to thinking. Intellectual strength isn’t transmitted by lecture or implanted with a diploma. It is built the same way that the figure skater builds a routine or the running back learns to explode through a crack in the line—repetition after repetition, failure after failure, with no shortcut available and no machine that can stand in.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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Large language models and the long shadow of the job market—are we grading for the student or for the gatekeepers beyond graduation?—have disrupted a centuries-old educational paradigm. The stick is broken and the carrot has lost its taste. If the process is the goal, we should be focussing on how to create classrooms that make the process feel worth doing for its own sake.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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The progymnasmata were a sequence of rhetorical exercises, graduated in difficulty, designed to build a student’s capacity for argument, the way a training program builds a runner’s endurance: incrementally, with each exercise preparing the ground for the next. The goal was not a finished piece of writing but a strengthened mind.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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For years, the architecture of higher education quietly encouraged students to believe that the point of a class, and indeed of the entire college experience, was the credential—that the teacher-student relationship was a transactional one that ended with a grade. But if the grade is the goal, and a machine can get you the grade, the machine is not a shortcut; it’s just efficiency.
~ Dan Rockmore via The New Yorker

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