The Write Way to Develop Our Kids
ChatGPT has people fearing that students will adapt it to cheat.
They're missing the point. We need to teach them actual writing, which helps
youngsters to learn how to think, organize and execute-- important business
skills that have faded in the iPhone generation.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
There's so much misguided press and frantic conversations about
ChatGPT and its clones writing papers for high school and college students that
it makes me wonder how so many "literates" and arguably educated
folks can be completely missing the central concern.
The authenticity of the ultimate composition is only part of the
education equation - and maybe not even the most important part. The essence of
composition is a series of careful and creative steps: selecting a subject;
assembling the facts and arguments you want to share; organizing your thoughts
in an orderly fashion; and then clearly, concisely, and convincingly setting them
down and communicating them. There may be a fast-approaching time when the
physical part of this process-- the assembly of the material and an outline of
its contents -- can be done mechanically and competently by machines. But it
has nothing to do with how we need to be educating our kids and preparing them
to be a valuable part of our future workforce.
This is the exact same conversation we have with parents who
insist that they want their kids to learn code in school and who don't
necessarily appreciate that it's not about learning the specific code -- which
will be outdated and superseded in seconds. Writing code is really about learning
how to think about the problem being solved by the
programs being built and the best ways to accomplish the goals of the project.
That's what really matters.
All these articles -- which generally assume that our kids are
inclined to be lazy, arrogant and crooked -- are also too often focused
primarily on the foolish question of whether the AI-invented (or stolen) output
can successfully fool the faculty, as if that was the ultimate objective. As if
the faculty members were utterly incapable -- by simply asking a question or
two of any suspected students -- of determining whether the accused are
actually guilty of the crime. It's really no harder than figuring out whether
Mom or Dad helped Junior do his math homework last night, an age-old and
traditional inquiry every teacher has mastered.
But what's really sad is how these self-appointed and overly
concerned guardians of the integrity of our educational institutions -- most of
whom have never taught anything -- are missing the point. It's the
end-to-end process of effective writing, not necessarily the resultant product,
that we're trying to teach our kids to learn, and to do well. And, just
to be clear, we're doing a fairly miserable job of at the moment. We're
teaching our kids to type, but not to write.
We see college graduates entering the workforce who require
months of remedial instruction and who couldn't compose a simple business
letter or proposal if their life and livelihood depended on it. Honestly,
stream of consciousness spews haven't been in vogue since James Joyce; no one
wants to read your feelings vomited out on the page. I've been harshly
critical of rappers over their content, but they certainly understand that
their screeds have to have some pace and structure to make sense, along
with a dollop of Mom's spaghetti.
Unfortunately, in the name of freedom, flexibility, art and
creativity, too many college grads these days have been taught that they're
free to discard the rigor and rules of good writing as the toxic demands of the
white privileged, and to write however and whatever they choose. It seems to be
more about hubris than homework. Everyone wants to be on a winning team, but no
one wants to come to practice.
This permissiveness makes for mush and it's not that much
different from what I used to tell young artists when I served on the board of
the New York Academy of Art, as well as new employees who insisted on doing
their own thing: learn to write properly first, and then ignore it eventually
if you choose. Too much imagination - too little skill. Feelings aren't
everything -- art is nothing without form. Creativity without craft and
constraints equals crap.
Whether it's the fault of our schools, the sins of spellcheck,
the arrogance of auto-fill or just the complete devaluation of writing as a
crucial business communication tool, we've really dropped the ball on making it
clear to our kids that being a good writer is a crucial part of being a good
citizen and good person as well. Writing is vital to our intellectual growth.
Dreaming about things being better is okay, but writing those dreams down makes
them concrete and putting them in action makes them real. Don't just think it.
Ink it. Putting your dreams on paper is like stirring the embers of your life
into a fire.
Writing is a powerful and rewarding discipline -- great
when you finally get it right, and torture the rest of the time. At least for
me. Editing is even worse, although there's a real appeal to the successive
approximation that draws you constantly closer to the final achievement. If
young people don't learn early on that the things in life that they'll come to
value are those that they've worked hardest to achieve, then they'll never
understand that if you don't put the work into something you'll never know the
true worth of it.
Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. The routine of daily
writing, the rigor of edit and review, and the power of iteration and continual
refinement are powerful ways to offset the daily, unceasing noise, the constant
dopamine distractions and the utter lack of focused attention that is killing
our ability to concentrate. Even worse, the clutter and noise are slowly
destroying our kids' ability to learn. They're insatiably curious to know
everything about nothing worth knowing. They don't care what's on the screen;
they want to know what else is on. Kids with remote controls are like ferrets
on double expresso.
Drugs won't help, but a daily dose of patient and painstaking
attention to the details and demands of creating and crafting something of
style and substance might just do the trick. If it's not handwritten, by the
way, it's probably not worth doing. There's a power and an emotional connection
to the care and beauty of cursive (and all forms of calligraphy) that we're
also on the cusp of losing forever. Clever fonts and emojis will never cut it.
Start small. Get your kids a notebook or a diary, sit them down
first thing in the morning each day, and ask them to write three pages of
anything. Check out the Morning Pages concept from Julia
Cameron, which isn't just for artists. It's almost as effective a
protocol as Jack Dorsey's daily ice baths in
terms of providing an energizing kickstart for the rest of the day.
Our kids and our employees are all in a hurry to be bosses,
creators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. They've been convinced
that there are tricks of the trade and painless shortcuts to such success if
they can only find them, but true success knows no shortcuts. They want to be
alive, always on, excited and thrilled in every way because that's the false
and rotten dream they've been sold by social media -- the toilet of the
Internet. They're told that they must be "inspired" and bring their
"whole" selves to every occasion. But it's not the Hokey Pokey.
We need to tell them to slow down and wake up. And we need to
tell them what every great writer (but not ChatGPT) will tell them about
writing and inspiration: You don't sit down to write because you're inspired;
you become inspired because you sit down to write. Each day and every day.