Where do we learn how to write?

Writing isn’t just a way of communication. It is a way of learning about yourself and learning how to show up, how to speak, how to develop and wrestle with ideas. Learning to write is enabled by good constraints, by a purpose that is not about the artifact but about the process of its creation. Cory Doctorow today talks about learning to write in the university context, where writing is almost always about the artifact and not the process. He shares experiences of great writing workshops because his experience is that learning how to write is relational.

It’s revelatory. It teaches you what you know. It lets you know what you know. It lets you know more than you know. It’s alchemical. It creates new knowledge, and dispels superstition. It sharpens how you think. It sharpens how you talk. And obviously, it sharpens how you write.

I appreciate too how he talks about the stakes that students face. Reporting on a faculty meeting he attended at Cornell, Doctorow writes:

It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students’ attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they’re afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.

That is unreal pressure. It usually takes several years in a professional context before people are allowed to make six figure decisions that impact people’s lives and yet we expect that students take this into consideration with every test and reading and essay they have to write.

If you find out that your degree isn’t what you want to study, or you had shitty profs who ruined your learning experience, or you drop out to do something else, you still owe the money back.

So try being a student with $50,000 in debt on the line. Why wouldn’t you use ChatGPT to produce something the exactly matches the rubric for success upon which you will be graded? The risk not doing so is too great.

Cory’s meditation on learning to write is a microcosm of what universities are facing. The constraints that now exist on teachers and students of higher learning have transformed institutions ever further away for their stated missions of being places of learning and inquiry. Universities are trying hard to balance their core missions of creating spaces active and powerful learning, research and intellectual formation with the ill informed political mandates that are constraining that very mission. The result will be devastating over the long term, doubling down on a generation of students who are already indentured debtors, who were educated in a way that minimally supported their learning by teachers who were prevented from teaching good process and helping students explore, stumble, fail, and grow.

That has impacts on the workplace because it requires employers to do the education that universities are no longer able to do. If a student doesn’t learn to write in university because the cost of failure is too high they are going to have to learn on the job. Most employers trust the education system to provide them with generally competent well rounded people that are capable of basic permanent skills. That’s the bargain of public education.

When I hear employers complaining about “this current generation” of new graduates it makes me want to ask them what they did to ensure that the public education system was working at its absolute best. The ability for folks to teach and learn at every level of the education system has been eroded by resources cut by austerity measures or ideological decisions. The pressure from people who are employers to cut government funding or to go to war against particular ideological bugaboos, be they social, cultural or scientific, further erodes both the resources and methods that are used to educate students.

Writing, reading, expressing yourself, engaging in dialogue, collaborating, and creating are all permanent skills. The trend in education of all kinds is to make these skills inferior to the measurable and temporary skills because they are not measurable in transactional and financially relevant ways. They are life skills. They require mentorship, safety in failure and exploration from teachers who can help a student see where they are and grow. Education should be the place from which students are launched with the ability to develop and refine their practices of these skills over a lifetime.

This is how a university turns out citizens who contribute to the world from a secure place of knowledge and confidence. Trained as permanent learners.

Short-term thinking driven by fiscal or ideological concerns builds a system that encourages students to cheat, or more precisely, waste their learning time gaming the system so they achieve the carrot of approval. It drives teachers crazy, who grow more and more powerless to stop it. And it turns out into the world young adults who are woefully ill equipped for a world of massive uncertainty which requires diverse brilliance, talent and creativity.