AI & Liberal Arts
/In a liberal arts education, the student herself is the product.
Instead of creating a product, humanities education is different. The students themselves are what’s getting created and recreated through the learning process.
A liberal arts education is to be personally transformative by cultivating virtues.
Aristotle saw education as a pursuit that’s personally transformative. He believed the most fundamental goal was not just imparting knowledge, but cultivating virtues that make for a flourishing life.
A product-based, utilitarian vision of college is inadequate.
A college must be a place where the goal of flourishing lies underneath the assignments, the tests, the discussions, the feedback, the clubs, and the social structure. Using generative AI in the classroom threatens to leave out of the process something vital: friction. Cognitive automation threatens to minimize cognitive friction.