As the education scholar Gert Biesta has argued, over the 1980s and ’90s the very idea of “education” was displaced in favor of an ideal of “learning.” Education implies a teacher, a subject, and a purpose; learning is something an individual does. What Biesta termed “learnification” meant that the transmission and application of knowledge became a priority across society and the economy in order to produce more active, independent, and prosperous citizens. Not only was “learning” (unlike “education”) something that could occur anytime and anywhere, but evidence of it would be found in practical applications, that is, the ability of individuals to achieve their goals. Pedagogy became anchored in cognitive science, so as to instrumentalize it in the service of economic ends

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The threat posed by LLMs is not so much that they remove the difficulty of reading and writing (as the agonistic humanists would have it), as that they remove the playfulness, the uncertainty, and the intriguing mistakes.

What needs reviving is not some classical ideal of “Man,” but, as Weatherby argues, poetry. Textual generation, he writes, “puts poetry on one end of a spectrum bookended on the other by ideology.” Where we feel compelled to use the correct words in the right order, for fear of consequences, we are victims of ideology. LLMs allow us to witness our own ideological constraints, showing us how our culture has been streamlined, disciplined, and constrained into certain forms of expression. Poetry, by contrast, is the exploitation of the improbable, based on the assumed freedom to put words in an order that wasn’t expected and hasn’t been done before. The point is not that only humans can write an improbable sentence; machines can too. It is that a student should be free to try one, and to get it wrong.