Reflect

Her advice was simplistic – and I know people who work in bookshops might disagree with it! – but it spoke to one reality of being a teacher with a degree in a subject, hopefully, that you feel passionate about. However inspired you are by literature, by history or by biology, you will have to work in a system where inspiration and enthusiasm is less important than consistency and results. All students in the UK sit important exams at 16 and 18 – and those exams don’t really test inspiration or passion. Coaching students on how to jump through the hoops of exam questions, repeating the same material year after year, teaching young people who simply don’t share your enthusiasm: this is the work that dominates much of a teacher’s life.

Teachers certainly understand the value of strong exam results and why qualifications are so important to students. But it’s frustrating to feel that exams, which dominate so much planning and lesson time, don’t give students an authentic taste of the subjects which teachers find so fascinating and enriching.

It’s almost impossible for exams, and for a rigid school curriculum, to replicate the feeling of discovery and independent enquiry that comes when you immerse yourself in a subject. When you’re reading from a narrow list of well-worn literature set texts, you can’t pursue other works from a favourite author, or become an expert in a genre or movement, or look at how works speak to each other across centuries. When your history exam tests knowledge of one specific time period, there’s no space for exploring long-term causes and patterns or asking questions about what happened next.

I was in a fortunate generation: the last, perhaps, for whom the financial burden of studying at university wasn’t so high as to seriously influence my choice of course. I was encouraged by my parents to follow my interests, and a degree in English was seen by them as incredibly worthwhile. But in the UK and abroad, enrolments in humanities degrees such as English, history, philosophy and classics are falling as students gravitate towards STEM subjects. UCAS reports a growing emphasis amongst students on employability and workplace skills when choosing a degree.

When students get the sense that education is simply a question of ticking off tasks and proving they’ve met the requirements of the course, it’s understandable that they begin to prioritise completing particular tasks over the learning those tasks are intended to measure. Schools and universities alike report the increased use of AI software such as ChatGPT to complete homework assignments, coursework and undergraduate essays.

There’s a saying going around social media that using AI to complete your assignments is like taking a forklift truck to the gym: the point isn’t that the weights need to be lifted, what matters is that you’re the one lifting them. We might think it’s incredibly cynical of students to take what seems to be a shortcut to success – that by trying to cheat the system, they’re only cheating themselves out of the opportunity to learn from their teachers. But if their experience of education is simply a list of work to complete and certificates to acquire, it’s not surprising they’re willing to forgo the part that is supposed to inspire wonder and intellectual enquiry: the actual learning process.

Motivate

When students really get to grips with the key ideas behind a poem or a novel, when they start to see the overall pattern that connects its different elements, they can begin to generate their own ideas and insights, often beyond anything their teacher has given them. That’s when I’ll say the magic words, “You’re starting to sound like an English student!”

A student who uses AI to complete their work is passing off other people’s knowledge as their own, but more damagingly they’re not nurturing their own ability to be insightful or have original ideas. AI serves up an average of the work people have done before us: it won’t lead us into the creative, unpredictable discoveries we can make on our own. To a student grappling with a Shakespeare play I might sound like an “expert”, but almost everything I know about those texts has come to me in the process of writing about or teaching them.

Arts and humanities subjects will always have a vital role to play, and we should keep promoting them even to students who naturally incline towards STEM options or see science and technology-based courses as a more reliable route into work. Art and literature can teach us much about empathy, about imagining a life beyond our own, about being creative, reflective people capable of learning and of grappling with deep questions. Without celebrating the importance of that learning process for its own sake, we risk raising young people who see knowledge and ideas simply as downloadable content.

There are wider ethical implications too. Creativity and critical thinking have an important role to play in making young people resilient to toxic, online ideologies, as neuroscientist Dr Leor Zmigrod, author of The Ideological Brain, recently told Tooled Up.

Support

Talk about the value for your child in completing schoolwork for themselves, and establish a set of family values around the use of AI software such as ChatGPT. When can those programmes usefully help us, and when are they a shortcut that takes the meaning out of learning?

If your child is choosing subjects to study in the next phase of their education, try to encourage a rounded selection of options that includes creative subjects and humanities. Even the top medical degree courses in the UK allow students to include a subject such as English literature or history in their A levels, and those habits of curiosity, insight and empathy will be invaluable for any profession. They’re what make you an interesting person with plenty to talk about!

We all know that a wide and varied diet of reading, and exposure to different arts and experiences, is hugely beneficial both for children’s academic success and wellbeing. But try to model actively engaging with what they read or encounter: predictive questions such as, “What do you think happens in the next book?”, connective questions such as, “Where have you seen a character like that before?”, and questions to get them noticing what stands out or seems important.

Finally, try to model the resilience you want your children to have. Talk to your children about the things you've found difficult and how you eventually mastered them. The experience of learning is what's valuable: celebrate it when you can.