It's Time to Erase the Essay

Teachers, not students, need to adapt

We should stop routinely asking adolescents to write essays.

Most people who know me consider me a History teacher, which indeed I am. But for much of my life I’ve considered myself a writing teacher. (I began my career as a Teaching Fellow at Brown in this role, and spent seven years as a preceptor of Expository Writing—the sole required course in Harvard’s curriculum—for first-year students.) I’ve long considered the essay as the apogee of intellectual achievement in the Humanities: a process of sorting information, structuring its flow, extracting meaning, and persuading a reader to see a matter differently, all realized in a piece of original expository prose. Any given essay did some of these things better than others, and some students were developmentally farther along than others. (Any teacher will tell you that grading is, hands down, the worst part of the job—one for which teachers are now using AI.) However, coaching students to achieve these objectives has always been the essence of education: the practice and deployment of critical thinking.

I’ve long consoled myself that amid the vast technological changes in our time, my job was one that could never be outsourced. But eighteen months ago, ChatGPT-3—the opening salvo in a series of widely available Artificial Intelligence chat bots—became available, and it was widely believed that this technology would transform education. There was similar talk when personal computers became widely available in the eighties, and the Internet became widespread in the nineties. But I think this time is different. I’ve spent 2024-2025 crafting prompts that I hoped would be AI-proof. This spring, I’ve concluded I can’t. And that I shouldn’t even try.

Part of that conclusion is a purely instrumental one: I can’t prevent kids from using AI in whole or part to “write” essays, and I lack confidence I can recognize it when they do. (Which is no small thing: one cannot make such accusations lightly, both as a matter of backlash and/or as a sinkhole of bureaucratic wrangling.) I was a little surprised when, during a recent visit to the University of Chicago, admissions officers confidently asserted they could recognize AI in student essays and police its use in its legendary admissions prompts. But I just put a UC chestnut—"Is a hot dog a sandwich?” into Gemini, adding, “Answer as a 17-year-old from Houston”—and got a pretty good reply with a local angle. And I know my students better than they possibly could.

There are workarounds. I’ve become a habitual assigner of in-class essays—questions not given in advance that have to be answered during a class session using software that allows me to monitor their laptops and block their Internet access. And I’m currently in the process of implementing oral exams that will require students to demonstrate mastery (or, at any rate, familiarity) with the reading and an ability to think on their feet, though this is a work in progress. These are assessments that ask students to do meaningful things with real-world utility. But neither really allows for the kind of reflection and distillation that a good essay affords.

To some extent, I’m casting the problem in overly stark terms. In fact, few students simply type into a chatbot, copy, paste, and submit. Whether as a matter of cheating or not, their work is typically a matter of bricolage—carving, splicing, bridging, and the like. There’s something to be said for this as an educative process. What you get from AI is a matter of what you ask; comparing results and choosing them is an act of discrimination; handing in something like that is a matter of taking a position, even if it’s store-bought rather than homemade, as it were. You have to stand by the work, even if it isn’t exactly your work. Maybe there will be a bot someday called “Speechwriter.”

But we’re now talking about a different thing: a collage is not a painting. And to at least some extent this is precisely my point: the meaning of education is evolving. Teachers have to think less about trying to shoehorn kids into doing the stuff that’s always been done in the past and more about what it means to operate successfully in the intellectual environment of the future. Anti-intellectual environments, one might say, and it’s very hard not to experience this as unadulterated decline. But once upon a time, the mark of an educated man (and I do mean man) was learning Greek and Latin. And memorizing poetry. Certainly not reading classic works of American literature, because before World War II, classic American fiction was a contradiction in terms—certainly not an appropriate topic for classroom study. (And fiction, for that matter, was regarded as something that corrupted the morals of the late eighteenth-century girls who read it). You get the idea. Taking it to heart, though, is another matter. It’s a tough assignment in seeming all too easy. To which I say: get to work!