Calculators or bad managers? Scholars debate the AI metaphor reshaping education
jonippolito · x · 2026-08-30
The Writing Transformers group (Maha Bali, Anna Mills, Mark Marino and others) published a new roundtable debate questioning whether the popular metaphor "generative AI is to writing classes what calculators were to math" holds up.
Key threads:
- Calculators only raised the floor of math, while agentic AI may turn students into "managers" who demand outcomes while ignoring process—prompting bots may be training bullying-style delegation; education may need to train students for that managerial role.
- Opens with locked-down browsers as a way to prevent AI misuse in online assessment, and how evaluation must adapt.
- Whether high-stakes fields (law, medicine, engineering) can tolerate over-reliance on AI, and whether a student's own caring about the work can be leveraged to discourage offloading thinking.
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