But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held.

My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change. If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on.

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.

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