"There is a danger in being persuaded before one understands"

‘Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them’ (A. Huxley)

We would be fools not to try and anticipate (and predict) the future when it comes to what we do and what we love. I’m a teacher, a teacher-trainer in fact, and I love books and what’s in them – and no, it doesn’t mean I love every single book ever published nor does it mean that I read everything and anything. When it comes to what I read personally, I’m pretty demanding in fact, both in terms of content and form. When it comes to teaching with a book (Teaching with literature), I’m obviously more flexible since that teaching is related to learning aims – typically, cognitive and social – and so form and content are important in what they can do to me and my students, and what we can do with them.

The point is: I think those two things are massively important: Education, and Creation.

Now it’s become very clear in the last few years that both those things are under attack: from some people, from some corners of society, and from AI.

Let’s take the first one. Trump in 2016 was a shock, but it wasn’t the first: there were some little despots in Europe restricting free speech, some low-life tyrants deciding what one should know, and of course some societies so heavily dominated by religion that thinking for oneself was (and is) a sin. A friend of mine, long ago, did her PhD on History textbooks used in Northern Ireland schools during the 1980s and 1990s: what she found then was that those textbooks gave a version of history, certainly not History – a version that served the interests of those behind their publication (i.e. those in power then: Loyalist groups). We’ve long known that ‘History is written by the victors’, but what we didn’t suspect was who those victors would turn out to be: it’s understandable enough (if obviously reprehensible) to re-write history for political or religious reasons, but it’s rather a shock to see billionaires doing it for money.

Or governments doing it for money too, except it’s to save some, not to earn any.

And that’s where Education comes in, because surely the relationship between knowledge, understanding and societal living is absolutely essential in ever more divided, fractured and fragmented societies. What was that quip Dr. Johnson made about Scotland (a place he famously didn’t like)? Talking about the insufficiency of education in Scotland, Johnsons said: ‘Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal’. Well, what do you do with a little bread? What happens when you cannot get a full meal anymore? And crucially: what happens when most are denied even a little bread?

Some governments would have us believe (or do they even care whether we do?) that the future will solve the past’s problems, especially with Technology (I give it a capital letter because that’s how that word sounds in so many mouths these days – ah, the heady fumes of Tech!). And that’s well known, right? If technology creates a problem, another technology will solve it. Ah yes, a logical fallacy that keeps Musk and his ilk at the top of the rich-list while blatantly ignoring, well…that it’s a fallacy. If eating potatoes makes you ill, would you eat some more as a remedy? If technology kills the planet, does it make sense to only look for technological solutions to that problem?

This is an appropriate place to quote the 18^th-Century Bishop Wilson (quoted in Geoffrey Madan): ‘There is a danger in being persuaded before one understands’: today, way too many people are ‘persuaded’ that Tech is good, Tech will work, Tech will do this or that, without them understanding the first thing about it, its potential effects – and without taking the time to think it through a little. ‘Embrace the new, out with the old, We know and you don’t’: bloody hell.

As Richard Feynman told a student who wrote gibberish to him: ‘Don’t you take time to think?’.

 But no worries: as we are constantly reminded by those decide, learners of the future will be different, they will learn differently, they will know different things, so all will be well. I’ve no doubt they will be (and already are) different, but in what sense? Different from me, yes, because I’m from another generation. Different from how people have been for many, many years? No: the Romans or the Ancient Greeks were in no way different cognitively – they knew (or didn’t know) different things, but their brains, their intellectual abilities, were in no way different from ours. I’m sorry but it’s true: you’re not smarter than an ancient Greek, you just know different things in a different environment.

So when Tolstoy remarks in his diary that ‘The job of a school is not to impart knowledge but to impart respect for the idea of knowledge’, you can see where he’s coming from: respect for what is known, respect for what enables us to go further, see further, understand better. If you do not respect the idea of knowledge, you desire for knowledge will disappear, and, as we’re seeing in America these days, that desire will actually turn into a disrespect, or worse: a suspicion of, a doubting of, a questioning of, all of which leads insensibly towards the condemnation of knowledge.

And that is obviously compounded by search engines and other AIs that promise ‘knowledge at your finger-tips! No need to learn, no need to look for answers, it’s right there if you can type a prompt!. Really why should you bother to learn stuff, learning is for nerds, who cares?’

And there is the problem then: if Governments and States give up on the idea of Education, as they are doing in America, in The Netherlands, in France, in England, what will be left?

Technology, that’s what. And so we get all ‘consultants’ and ‘specialists’ telling us that AI is ‘a wonderful sparring partner’, it’s a ‘new way to learn better’, it’s ‘more efficient’. A sparring partner? But for what? How do you translate that school approach in real life?

Do you really believe that people will ask Chatgpt (or its equivalent) a question, then debate the answer in their minds? Do you really believe people will ask Chaptgpt ‘What is this, or how does that work?’, and then double-check?

Of course they won’t, for at least four reasons:

• We’re all too lazy to systematise such an approach to knowledge
• Our education systems have given up on knowledge to focus on fun, jobs and profits
• We’re being sold (force-fed, more like) the idea that Tech is the solution and will make it all easier.
• We’re being told, constantly, that Tech knows best: Tech has the answers, it amasses knowledge so you don’t have to.

Here’s a little nugget from Aldous Huxley, who people are fond of referencing but perhaps not of reading: ‘”Free as a bird”, we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings’.

And obviously, what he means by their ‘power of unrestricted movement’ has another name: Freedom. Freedom of thought, freedom of knowing, freedom from suspicion of knowledge and freedom from fear of knowing. At this rate, we’ll end up grounded, terribly heavy, incapable of movement, and slowly we’ll come to think our situation normal – what? We used to fly? Ah come on, that’s just a lie…

There can be no real human creation if the ideas come from a machine that simply regurgitates what previous humans have done and thought.

There can be no real education if the Powers doubt it, condemn it, under-finance it, and claim to be able to fix it by…not offering it anymore.

‘Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can do resist them’.

 

• A. Huxley. Brave new world revisited, 1958.
• Tolstoy. Diaries, 2015; the quote is from the entry for April 1861.
• The Reverend Wilson is quoted by Geoffrey Madan in his ‘Notebooks’ (1985)
• Richard Feynman: Don’t you have time to think? Letters, 2006.
• The Johnson quote comes, unsurprisingly, from Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) :)