Today I saw a post on Douban. The content came from Umberto Galimberti’s book L’ospite inquietante, probably from a chapter about schools. I haven’t found any sign of a Chinese translation yet, so I’m guessing... this teacher is probably translating it now. (Hehe! Nothing to lose if I’m wrong~
They translated the passage into Chinese like this: The root of students’ loss of motivation to learn is the widespread tendency in society to objectify people. Doctors see patients only as biological organisms; workplaces judge people only by how efficiently they work, reducing their identities to what they produce. This leads schools to copy the idea of “returns” from economics when judging students, quantifying education completely and counting only knowledge points and scores.
Then a few points came to mind, connecting some of my past experiences with little things I’ve been thinking about lately.
And then! I’m leaving a record of them here too.
1) If you have the chance to observe K–12 kids up close, it’s easy to see their energy drop from one grade to the next. At that point in their lives, the environment around them includes parents and other elders, teachers, friends and classmates, and the internet. Now it also includes AI.
2) I recently met a very energetic young person whose thinking and output depend heavily on AI. It gives me the sense that “AI is my brain, and I am my body.”
3) Since AI appeared, taste has become a word everyone uses. It’s a little like a rat everyone wants gone: everyone chases after it, and everyone tries to stay away from it.
4) Someone in the comments said, “When you see a problem, you also need to prescribe a remedy.” That made me think of how many people say, “Here, people are only selected, not developed.” This really does happen. I used to see people say it was because there were too many people here, but I don’t think that is the whole reason. Another part of the reason may be that even when someone wants to develop people, they can’t think of a better path that can work with business while also allowing them to survive, or even multiply. “Developing people” takes resources, and behind those resources, there also needs to be a system that can keep running and giving back... So what do we do? I feel like more people still need to study how developing people can become more sustainable.
Galimberti also says in the book that once schools accept only what can be “calculated,” the parts that are not easy to “calculate” will be excluded, such as creativity, emotions, identity, imagination, desire, joy, and pain... In other words, when knowledge itself becomes the goal, and grades become the measure of whether that knowledge has been gained, our agency gradually goes quiet within the institution of school, or even disappears.
Ah, lately I’ve been tirelessly trying to correct AI’s habit of saying nonsensical and wildly ridiculous things when it generates text, like “give its little head a tap.” Right now, I feel like my own little head is getting pummeled by the world: I’ve finally brought the word agency back to my past experiences of educating and being educated.
