Could AI replace the teaching of writing? Why the Boston Globe op-ed is dead wrong.

Writing teacher Stephen Lane’s essay in the Boston Globe is titled “AI in the classroom could spare educators from having to teach writing.”

There are two reasons to teach writing. First, it is a skill that students will need as adults, even in a world drenched in AI tools. And second, learning to write is learning to think. Both will remain important.

Deconstructing Lane’s arguments

Here’s what Lane writes, and my responses:

Of all the skills I teach my high school students, I’ve always thought writing was the most important — essential to their future academic success, useful in any profession. I’m no longer so sure.

Thanks to AI, writing’s place in the curriculum today is like that of arithmetic at the dawn of cheap and widely available calculators. The skills we currently think are essential — spelling, punctuation, subject-predicate agreement — may soon become superfluous, and schools will have to adapt.

The universe of human knowledge is nearly infinite, but the school year is not. Because every curricular decision has an opportunity cost — teaching more of one thing means cutting something else — teachers spend a lot of time trying to sort the need-to-know from the nice-to-know. And given what AI can do, writing may no longer be a need-to-know.

We have calculators, but we still teach arithmetic and important skills like estimating and probability. Why? Because machines can’t replace reasoning. That’s every bit as true about writing as it is about math.

AI should make it easier to teach writing — including how to write using AI as a tool. AI can replace drudgery, not writing as a thinking exercise.

I say this as someone who loves teaching every step of the writing process, from distilling a jumble of ideas into a coherent thesis, to mastering and manipulating essay structure, to getting the feel of the rhythm and flow of sentences, to chasing down the perfect word or phrase. Learning all of this can be a grind for students. Helping them through it is one of my favorite parts of the job.

Sorry, saying “I love to teach writing” doesn’t give you any special license to stop teaching writing. (Google “I come to bury Caesar.”)

But writing takes a lot of time to do well, and time is the most precious resource in education. Longer writing assignments, like essays or research papers, may no longer be the best use of it. In the workplace, it is becoming increasingly common for AI to write the first draft of any long-form document. More than half of professional workers used AI on the job in 2023, according to one study, and of those who used AI, 68 percent were using it to draft written content. Refining AI’s draft — making sure it conveys what is intended — becomes the real work. From a business perspective, this is an efficient division of labor: Humans come up with the question, AI answers it, and humans polish the AI output.

In schools, the same process is called cheating.

The ethics of original scholarship are a pillar of education, which makes AI an uncomfortable fit in the classroom. But AI is in the classroom, and teachers need to teach students how to use it. The challenge is to uphold the bedrock value of academic integrity at the same time. The best way to do so may be to separate writing from scholarship.

So, so close to right.

Yes, teaching carefully footnoted, meticulously researched papers may no longer be relevant. So stop doing that.

Instead, teach the use of AI as a tool for research, and how to address what it does right (summaries) and what it does wrong (human creativity, hallucinations). Ethan Mollick figured out how to do this in his classroom. We need a curriculum that does it, too.

Before putting words on paper, students must figure out what they want to say, which is a two-step process involving two fundamental, complementary skills. First comes analysis, literally the breaking of something into pieces, down to its simplest components — like a tinkerer taking apart a complicated mechanism. Whether students are studying a historical event, a poem, or a novel, the goal of analysis is to achieve understanding.

Next comes synthesis, the creation of a new whole, through which students turn understanding into meaning and form opinions about what they have learned.

These two steps are where students do their real thinking. Writing is secondary — just the tool for conveying their ideas. But students often get so lost in trying to put their ideas into words that they lose sight of the ideas themselves.

So teach the use of AI in defining a problem, analysis, and synthesis. It’s about creation, not about typing.

AI at its most helpful is meant to free us from mundane tasks. As much as it hurts me to say it, writing is a mundane, even tedious task for most students. AI can’t do all the work of writing for them; students still need to understand a topic well enough to know what they want to say about it. Even with AI, a muddy thesis yields a muddy essay. Garbage in, garbage out.

And just as AI users must do in the workplace, students need to revise AI’s output to ensure that it accurately reflects their ideas. But AI can do what many students think of as grunt work: grinding through the rules of structure, syntax, and organization to turn their ideas into a coherent, if not wholly inspired, piece of writing. It offers them the gift of time.

If writing is a tedious task, you’re teaching it wrong. Teach the joy of writing. As I wrote in another post, “The objective of teaching writing — at any level — should be to encourage students to engage with words and ideas, using any tools available. If they’re destined to become writers, this will stimulate their imaginations. And even if they’re not, this will tap into their natural interest in words and the tools we use to craft stories with them.”

I have become persuaded that this is the goal of teaching: to help students discover or develop their own convictions. . . .

If this all sounds starry-eyed or naive, so too is believing that students will continue to craft traditional essays starting with a blank page. The challenge in education will be to ensure that even if students use AI to communicate their ideas, the ideas represent their original thinking. That’s a knotty problem to address, but it is the reality we face. The skill of putting words on paper is becoming less important. Schools may no longer see the same value in teaching it.

So teach the creation of written material as a gateway to thinking and expressing yourself clearly. Including the use of AI.

A different perspective on teaching, certainly. But we’ll still be teaching “writing,” even if it uses different tools.

Writing may fade from the general curriculum, but it won’t disappear entirely. For some students — the diarists, the poets, the storytellers, the journalists, the ones who cannot contain themselves and hand in five single-spaced pages for a one-page assignment — writing will always be more than a mere tool. They will carve out a bigger space for it, claim it as an instrument of self-expression and affinity; a way to see, feel, shout, and whisper, to be heard by many or only by one. For these few, it will remain vital, inextricable — writing for writing’s sake, its purpose known only to those consumed by the need to do it, its value beyond measure.

Writing will not fade from the curriculum. It will change.

Students who love writing will always write.

Students who hate writing can be taught to love the value of creating written content with appropriate tools.

If we stop teaching writing, it’s far too easy to stop teaching thinking as well. We’re already too far down the path to that horrifying future. Let’s not take any more steps in that direction.