{"id":103407,"date":"2025-08-28T14:28:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T14:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/103407\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T14:28:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T14:28:38","slug":"to-the-class-of-2025-will-you-let-ai-think-for-you-or-learn-how-to-think-for-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/103407\/","title":{"rendered":"To the class of 2025: Will you let AI think for you, or learn how to think for yourself?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the Bachelor of Humanities<\/a> (Great Books) program at Carleton University.<\/p>\n

Dear students:<\/p>\n

You are entering university at an extraordinary moment. For the first time in history, machines can write essays, analyze literature, and engage in philosophical discussions. So you might reasonably wonder: If artificial intelligence<\/a> can do these things, why should you spend four years learning to do them yourself?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the truth: You need to learn these things precisely because machines can now do them. Your ability to think for yourself has become more precious than ever.<\/p>\n

We live in a world in which human experience has been flattened into neat categories of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. Complex cultural realities are being dismissed or forced to fit into familiar frameworks. Citizens increasingly assume that everyone across the globe thinks and aspires toward the same things we do here in North America. Contrary opinions are shouted down with emojis and memes, instead of being engaged through civil discourse.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just about political polarization, though that\u2019s been a huge symptom. It\u2019s about the loss of our capacity to grapple with human complexity and sit with ambiguity \u2013 to recognize that while human experience is constant across time and space, the frameworks through which we understand that experience can differ wildly from culture to culture and across space and time.<\/p>\n

One of the first stories we\u2019ll read this school year comes to us from ancient Mesopotamia. It\u2019s The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem about a king who embodied ultimate male patriarchal privilege, who exploited and abused his people, and who abandoned his responsibilities to satisfy his own bloodlust. His story should repel you.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

A tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.Fred Lum\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Yet year after year, students fall in love with this ancient hero. Why? Because beneath the chasms of language, culture, religion, and values between us and the text\u2019s ancient authors, Gilgamesh\u2019s humanity \u2013 his desires, loves, losses, grief, and psychological transformation in facing his own mortality \u2013 touches us across millennia. When professors ask you to wrestle with The Epic of Gilgamesh, we\u2019re not asking you to extract cold facts; we\u2019re asking you to think, to find what resonates, to feel.<\/p>\n

This is what great literature does: It tells the story of a single person and moves us to feel it as our own. AI can summarize the story, sure, and it can even tell you what scholars think these texts mean. But that doesn\u2019t provide meaning. The characters are only human when they are felt by a human; only you can discover what they mean to you. Only you can sit with confusion longer than feels comfortable, be changed by ideas you didn\u2019t know existed, absorb new ways of thinking and knowing the world, discover that there are multiple good answers to the deepest of questions, and learn that there is never a view from nowhere. This intertwining of the strange with the familiar is the essence of studying the humanities. <\/p>\n

Reading for meaning instead of plot summary isn\u2019t an inefficiency \u2013 it\u2019s how human consciousness grows. The detours, the confusion, the gradual dawning of understanding: these are the challenges and pleasures of human learning.<\/p>\n

For the past 15 years I have had the privilege of teaching the incoming students in Canada\u2019s only Bachelor of Humanities (Great Books) program \u2013 an intensive, discussion-based exploration of the foundational texts that have shaped human civilization. I love my job because exploring ancient ideas with students never gets old \u2013 your perspectives and takeaways from these texts always provide me with new insights, inspiration and delight. But threats have loomed large. Humanities programs face cutbacks and closures around the world, as governments, donors and too many parents don\u2019t see the return on investment. It\u2019s as though learning to read carefully, think critically, and communicate articulately are not desirable pursuits for a young person starting out in the world. <\/p>\n

And I\u2019ve watched all of the ways in which the current over-emphasis on STEM and \u201cskills-based\u201d teaching has produced citizens who don\u2019t know how to have a conversation about real things in real life. Even within many arts, humanities and social-science programs, pressures to produce tangible \u201clearning outcomes\u201d and a focus on hireability have eroded our society\u2019s ability to distinguish between theory and data; now, we rush to deploy ideological lenses as if they constitute foregone conclusions, rather than tools for understanding. Whether it\u2019s the left\u2019s insistence that every human drama fits into oppressor\/oppressed schemas or the right\u2019s inability to see nuance in critical analysis, both sides are screaming past each other, waving symbols out of context while accusing opponents of extremism. <\/p>\n

Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks<\/a><\/p>\n

Studying the humanities properly \u2013 not shying away from ideas we don\u2019t like, not imposing ideological lenses, learning to listen to others and to contemplate the foreign and the strange \u2013 cannot help but produce more thoughtful and discerning people. It allows us to see the human in each other \u2013 and to revel in the fact that humans are very, very complicated.<\/p>\n

The ability to think deeply about what it means to be human has never been more crucial. In a world in which algorithms increasingly determine what we see, read, and think about, learning to read closely, think independently, and write in your own voice isn\u2019t just an academic exercise \u2013 it\u2019s cognitive self-defense. <\/p>\n

We won\u2019t lie to you: This work is difficult. It requires patience and tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort. You\u2019ll need to engage in discussions where you might be wrong, look foolish, or change your mind. You\u2019ll stick your neck out and learn with others about how to expand each others\u2019 horizons rather than pulling out an axe. (You might also learn how to effectively mix metaphors.) <\/p>\n

Students who embrace this challenge, however, report something remarkable: They begin to trust their own minds in new ways. They discover they can grapple with complexity and articulate insights they didn\u2019t know they had. They find their voices \u2013 not the borrowed voice of AI, but their own voice, shaped by encounters with profound questions.<\/p>\n

As my incoming class, you are young humans bringing fresh perspectives to eternal questions, reading and seeing things in ancient texts that only you can. If you let AI do your reading and thinking, you rob both yourself and the rest of us of what you might have discovered.<\/p>\n

Opinion: In the AI revolution, universities are up against the wall<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, we can\u2019t force you to engage authentically with these materials. If you choose to let AI do your reading, thinking and writing, you might pass your courses; you might even get a piece of paper at the end of three or four years that says you are an educated person. But you\u2019ll have missed the point of an education entirely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not to jump through academic hoops. The point is what studying the humanities has always offered: the chance to develop your own humanity. In a world where authentic human thinking is becoming both rarer and more valuable, this matters more than any grade or diploma. <\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong: There are lots of other reasons to study the humanities.<\/a> For example, humanities graduates can have better-paying jobs over their lifetimes and more satisfying careers than their science counterparts. But no one studies the humanities to get a job. You gravitate to literature, philosophy, art and music history, religion and cultural studies because you\u2019re drawn to understand what it means to be human.<\/p>\n

So will you let machines think for you, or will you develop the irreplaceable capacity to think for yourself? The choice you make won\u2019t just affect your transcript. It will shape who you become in a world that desperately needs thoughtful, discerning human beings who can see the human in each other and in themselves.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the humanities. The conversation has been waiting for you, and I\u2019m so looking forward to hearing what you \u2013 the full you, with your own voice and mind \u2013 have to say.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the Bachelor of Humanities (Great Books)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,5152,61],"class_list":["post-103407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dei","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}