Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?

January 10, 2025

Bookshelves in Trinity Library in Dublin

(Plough) – Learning that one’s job might soon be eliminated by the emergence of an overhyped new technology puts one in good company.

Say, for example, you’re a college English teacher, and a significant portion of the nation’s venture capitalists seems convinced that a machine can now do – or will soon do, very soon, just a few more gigatons of water from now – what you are supposedly training your students to do. Say as well that these same machines, supposedly, are only one or two more clicks of Progress’s wheel away from being able to judge and grade the work thus generated. Clearly, you and your thousands of colleagues are now free to seek exciting new opportunities in our ever-moving economy – that is, to reap the punishment that you deserve for having cared about writing and reading in the first place. You ought to have learned to code, a skill that is itself also supposedly on its way to being rendered redundant by this new technology. Funny how that works out. (Read More)