I Asked AI to Write My Sister’s History Essay, and It Made Me Rethink Everything I Thought About Traditional School
Last month, my 16-year-old sister crashed on my couch for the week while my parents were out of town, and she was panicking over a 1,000-word European history essay on the Gutenberg printing press. She’d left her $80 rental textbook in her locker at school, and I was mid-fold of a mountain of gym socks, so I just waved my hand at my laptop and said, “Just ask the AI, it’ll do it in two minutes. No one needs that textbook anyway.”
Which is what I’ve believed for years, honestly. I graduated college seven years ago, still pay $180 a month on student loans for a communications degree that I use about 10% of the time. Half the skills I use for my freelance writing job I picked up from random YouTube tutorials and mid-pandemic Google spirals. When AI started popping up everywhere, I was the first person saying traditional education was on its way out – why pay tens of thousands of dollars for a degree when you can get any answer, any lesson, any how-to in 10 seconds for free?
So I watched the AI spit out this perfectly structured, perfectly cited essay in 30 seconds. It even added a cute little line about how the printing press laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation and modern social media, very on-trend. My sister copied it over, adjusted a few sentences so it sounded a little more like her, and turned it in. I didn’t think about it again until a few days later when she showed me the grade. She got an A-, which is great, but her teacher scrawled a note at the bottom in blue pen: “Solid summary. Where’s your take on this?”
That line stuck with me. It made me remember my own 101 European history class in college, the gen ed I complained about for months. Why does a comm major need to learn about 15th century printing, I whined to my roommate. I can just Google it if I ever need it. The professor was this guy in his 70s named Dr. Hale, who always had a coffee stain on the left cuff of his corduroy sweater, and he made us bring a physical printed copy of a Gutenberg Bible excerpt to class one day. We spent the entire 50 minute period just arguing about why adding spaces between words was such a big deal. I skipped the first 20 minutes of that class because I was hungover from a dorm party the night before, and I still got marked down for participation. I thought it was the biggest waste of time I’d ever sat through.
But here’s the thing. Last week I was writing an article about AI and misinformation, and I caught myself thinking about that argument. All those kids in that room, half of us scrolling TikTok under our desks, but we were going back and forth: when the printing press let anyone print anything, people panicked about false pamphlets turning everyone against the church, right? Sound familiar? That connection wasn’t in any of the facts the AI would have spit out for me. It was in the messy, off-topic, half-wrong arguing that happened when a room full of people who don’t know anything are forced to talk through it with a guy who’s spent 40 years thinking about it. I never would have made that link if I just had a list of bullet points from a chat.
I was at a freelance writer meetup last week, and half the people there were under 25, most of them never finished college, almost all of them use AI to draft most of their work. One 22-year-old kid named Javi makes twice what I do writing copy for brands, and he said he never took a single writing class in his life. He learned everything from free online posts and AI feedback. But then he paused, halfway through his cheap draft beer, and said he got stuck last month when he had to write a eulogy for his grandma. AI kept giving him this generic, beautiful stuff about loving family and legacy, but it didn’t know that she used to sneak him Sour Patch Kids before dinner when his mom wasn’t looking, that she hated fancy roses and only wanted the $2 carnations from the grocery store, that she used to hum off-key old Patsy Cline songs while she baked chocolate chip cookies. He couldn’t get it right until he put the AI away and just wrote what he remembered, the messy stuff that only he knew.
That’s the part no one talks about, right? AI and free online information give you all the facts. They give you all the how-tos. They can write your essay, teach you to code, walk you through fixing your leaky faucet. But traditional education isn’t just about facts. It’s messy, it’s slow, it’s full of stupid hoops that don’t make any sense. I still think it’s way too expensive, I still think half the classes I took were useless, I still tell kids if they can find a way to learn what they love without $30k in debt, do it. My cousin dropped out of state school after two years, did a $10,000 coding bootcamp, and got a job paying more than most of my four-year-degree friends straight out. I don’t think he made a bad choice at all.
But I also think about the art teacher I had in 10th grade, who pulled me aside after I turned in a terrible poem for a class assignment and told me I should keep writing, even when I was convinced I was garbage. I think about Dr. Hale marking me down for skipping class, and how that made me stop skipping after that, because it mattered that someone was paying attention to whether I showed up. I think about that note my sister’s teacher wrote, asking for her voice.
Is traditional education still worth it? I don’t have a clean answer. I still use AI every single day for work. I still Google any fact I don’t know instead of pulling out a textbook. If I had to do college over again, I still don’t know if I’d go, not with how much tuition has gone up since I graduated. But I do know that the stuff that stuck with me, the stuff that actually matters when I write, when I argue with my friends about politics, when I try to understand why the world is the way it is, that stuff didn’t come from a fact sheet. It came from sitting in a room with other people, messing up, getting told when I was wrong, being seen when I didn’t see myself. That’s the part you can’t download, not yet anyway. (Word count: 1182)
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