Die, Bureaucratic Monstrosity, Die!
The inhumanity of technocratic writing and education
I am begging your forgiveness, but a deep and hideous anger has boiling in my belly for some time now, creating a volcanic pressure in my metaphorical innards. If I don’t find a way to vent, to release that pressure, it’ll be the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa all over.
My spleen-venting has to do with how number-crunching bureaucrats, who must get their night’s rest sleeping on spreadsheets, are doing their best to mutilate all that is good in the world.
Pause. Breathe. Repeat.
OK. Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Gayle Greene that, like the dreadful words of the great prophets, spoke a needed truth into the world. It is called “The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning Outcomes’” and it is well worth reading. Green narrates how technocratic insistence on measuring and data-collection has not only mangled the beauty of the English language, but also reduced actual education to a robotic, inhuman system of regurgitating memorized, measurable knowledge. The system calculates achievement though a particularly mechanical language that it employs to define and measure “learning outcomes.”
The essay was cathartic for me. It expressed a frustration common among many people who went into education because they loved…well…EDUCATION, not empty report-writing to keep the technocracy spinning in circles. We believe that education is a long series of individual experiences that results in growth, intellectual, practical, and spiritual. What we strive to be are guides in that process. What our educational systems often force us to be are file clerks from a Franz Kafka novel.
I was recently ask to explain the benefit of a first-year experience class (FYE) in what I would call bureaucratic language. (Pause — Please know that the subject of FYEs is a bit of a thorn field and there are wild disagreements about it. I myself have very complicated feelings on the subject). Though FYEs are the subject of a lot of debate, I can pretty much explain the theoretical rationale for them.
What I apparently cannot do, however, is explain it in techno-babble. I was frustrated (in a manner similar to what Green describes in “Terrible Tedium”). Then an impish idea came to me.
Everyone has been talking about this Chat GPT bot that is freaking the world of education out because it can write about things for people. Apparently quite well. It’s been reported that the AI passed a Wharton MBA exam, which somehow seems both shocking and entirely predictable. After all, what other field of life loves empty jargon more than business?
But I digress.
Curious, I asked the bot the question that had been posed to me: “What are the benefits of a first year experience course in college?” Here is what the bot wrote:
A First Year Experience (FYE) course is valuable in college because it helps students transition to college life and academic expectations. The course often covers topics such as study skills, time management, and campus resources, which are critical for success in college. Additionally, FYE courses often provide an opportunity for students to connect with peers and build a support network within their college community. This can be particularly beneficial for first-generation college students, or students who may not have a lot of support from family or friends who have gone to college. Overall, the FYE course helps students gain the tools and knowledge they need to be successful in college, which can increase their chances of graduating.
So there it is. In the end, I decided not to use it because I felt it was just generic enough to find be buried in requests for citations and evidence. But honestly I wonder if it would have worked had I engaged the bot in follow up questions in the chat. Its logic and clichés are convincing enough and its vagueness is probably an asset, not a liability, for book-keepers.
Recently I wrote about the terrific new movie M3GAN. Though I shifted the focus to how the film gives us some sobering insight about social media, the direct commentary it makes about the temptations of AI are very powerful. One could easily see the film as an opportunity to think about the powers and pitfalls of ChatGPT.
Yes, I could save myself time and mental energy by offloading menial bureaucratic tasks to the bot. But what is the cost of developing that habit? What personal growth am I depriving myself of by doing so? Furthermore, I suspect that going down that road would lead to me labeling more and more things as simply “menial,” and my world would invariably shrink and diminish over time. This is how habits shape us.
In the end, the whole episode made me believe that what this system really wants, what it really needs, is to suck the humanity out of my body and use my skin and bones to carry an AI bot around the world, doing the calculation work of the robots. In a world where ChatGPT can produce text like that above, I can imagine a world where bots write things that other bots read and human beings become just annoying little speed bumps in the systems of efficiency.
Please God let me remain a speed bump for as long as I can.
Life is better with speed bumps.