Don’t be a good little soldier: individuals should not be scapegoats for institutional problems
Higher education is often experienced as a means to an end. Whose responsibility is it to challenge that?
I sometimes feel as though I’m not getting the most out of my education, and I wonder who should be held responsible for that feeling. With the rise of generative AI and declining attention spans, the temptation to take shortcuts at university is higher now than ever. Instead of sludging through thirty meandering pages of archaic language or sinking tens of hours into an essay, students have the option to just drop your readings into Claude and have it give you bullet points which sometimes explain or summarize the material better than lecture did.
As someone studying the humanities, I am not the only person anxious over what I’m getting out of my expensive education in this age of AI. Professors at UTM have had no choice but to dedicate larger and larger proportions of a course’s grade to participation marks or synchronous assessments. Whether it’s identifying passages, quizzes, or flash essays, the idea is the same—professors want to verify that students are actually reading what they were assigned. Educators and students often find that we have no control over the fact that AI seems to permeate almost every facet of society—from summarizing our text messages to reshaping the global economy and the future of our job prospects. Too often, it feels as though the only thing we can control is how we respond. So, it’s worth asking the question: what does responsibility look like, and how do we respond?
“Ten, fifteen years ago, it wouldn’t be uncommon for professors in upper year courses to assign, say, 30-60 pages per class per week. That’s quite uncommon now,” said Zain Raza, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UTM whose research concerns the philosophy of biology. “Now, most professors assign ten to twenty pages per week, and no one really reads more than that.”
Associate Professor Stanka Radović, from the Department of English and Drama, has decided on a similar path: “I am definitely opting for shorter and more manageable texts, so that students would at least come prepared to class. When I assign novels, especially longer ones, I find there’s a struggle to comprehend the reading,” she said during our interview.
These aren’t just isolated musings; they reflect a broader shift within academia to compensate for the consequences of a culture growing more reliant on AI. Students are less willing — and I fear, less capable — of engaging with material that challenges them. The latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report found that learning outcomes have either stagnated or declined since 2022, and that in 2025, 46% of students in examined countries actively used AI chatbots for schoolwork. In some cases, these students can be as much as an entire year behind their peers.
A Walton Family Foundation study found that higher enjoyment of leisure reading is linked to better academic performance, but that more than a third of Gen Z teenagers and children reported a dislike of reading, and a larger 43% responded that they never read for fun. To me, increased social media and generative AI use has meant that incoming students increasingly have worse and worse attention spans and confidence in working independently.
These high school findings have alarming implications for higher education as well, and not only for the individual student, but also for their peers and prospective instructors. I think that when enough students fail to to tread through the long, difficult assignments and readings, it lowers the quality of education for everyone. What do I mean by this?
For a second, I want to put aside the harrowing effects research has shown on generative AI-use, the decline in leisure reading, and social media platforms. It’s important to recognize that relying on AI in high school doesn’t automatically mean students will come to rely on it in university; not reading doesn’t imply one is not smart; and spending too much time on social media doesn’t mean our attention spans are forever doomed. But I do think that when students internalize a culture ripe with opportunities to opt out of cognitively difficult tasks — a phenomena referred to as “cognitive offloading” — instead of confronting their material head-on, they have less opportunities to organically discover, become less original, and can’t form deeper, more robust connections between intricate ideas. More importantly, they get into the habit of doing so.
I don’t think the changes we are currently experiencing in education is an issue of individual choice. Ultimately, individuals should not be scapegoats for an institutional problem. If a child is spending significant portions of their time on TikTok, inadvertently weakening their attention span, and disavows reading, it is not a failure on their part. Especially now with the dominance of AI, we condemn or shame individual choices but rarely do we contemplate the tide of forces against our youth, young adults, and students.
Social media companies have a vested interest in extracting capital from our attention spans and online behavior, and for instrumentalizing algorithms to fuel political and emotional narratives. The stated goal of designing these platforms is to make them as addictive as possible. What’s more, these companies are armed with a legion of behavioral scientists, UX designers, and increasingly, investment from right-wing government administrations — a profusion of capital and resources to aid them in achieving their venture.
The same goes for generative AI companies, who have bet their dollars on people offloading their cognitive ability. Whether social media or generative AI, the modus operandi is the same: provide an instant hit of relief, and make it addictive. Get them when they’re young, and you’ll have a customer for life. And the amount of relief these technologies can provide us – especially in our era of political and economic uncertainty – cannot be underestimated. We know these tech empires were never neutral — despite marketing their products as neutral technologies at our disposal. Higher education simply amplifies this truth.
“I think we’re definitely looking at a classroom that is much more anxious. And for good reason. I think students are experiencing a lack of options, of job prospects, housing — I think people are stressed out for very legitimate reasons,” commented Professor Radović. “Whatever changes we’re experiencing in education right now are environmental. Students’ always have the same potential — their capacity, intelligence, originality, enthusiasm, all haven’t changed. But their context has.”
“Students [before] weren’t as anxious as students are today,” said Professor Raza, when speaking on the same issue. “Students are being told that 50% of white collar jobs are going to disappear, they’re being told of an impending climate apocalypse — I can imagine it being very difficult to make space to focus on philosophy for its own sake.”
What’s changed isn’t just the rise in new technologies and changes in socioeconomic circumstances. It’s also the culture around education. The problem ultimately lies in the self-conflicting dual-role of higher education: it is a place where individuals grow as a human being and learn how to think for themselves, but it is also a place that prepares individuals to enter the workforce — in all of its nebulous, corporate structures.
I believe that the current structure of our society puts so much emphasis on students’ GPAs, career opportunities, and socioeconomic mobility — in one word, their futures — that students are disincentivized to think a little more, to read a little more. Especially since we’re paying so much for it, we feel as though we must get “the most out of our education” and in the least amount of time and debt incurred as possible. What’s the point of being here if all our hard work doesn’t lead to another degree, a job, or another stepping stone to something bigger and better, right? But that’s exactly the collective insecurity, so steeped within our culture, that AI takes advantage of.
“If your motivation is merely fulfilling tasks and achieving GPAs and so on, you’re not particularly open to taking risks,” commented Professor Radović. A lot of amazing culture emerges from improvisation, experimentation, and risk taking — you can only do that if you have the confidence in your society’s openness to it.”
Professor Raza has a similar view: “Things are worth doing for their own sake. One of those things is (learning to) think for yourself. And that requires you to do the work yourself. You’re missing the point of the work if you think the point is the finished product, rather than the training that goes into producing [it]. The goal of philosophy is not for us to give you a set of facts. The point of philosophy is for you to learn to come to the truth by yourself.” The implication that reading 60 pages from a book written by a guy that died before my grandparents were born might somehow be useful to me — not because I’m going to cite it in a job interview — is not something that is wholly compatible with our culture of acceleration and information, as opposed to deep learning.
While the fault ultimately lies with the people who hold the power over society, it doesn’t erase the responsibility that the rest of us have towards our own education and the education of our peers. We are no longer children. Short of vandalizing datacenters (I do not officially condone this), we as students who have a voice, as individuals who cannot help but participate in this system of production, have a vital responsibility to speak up against the technologies and cultures that aim to undermine us (take this idea as far as you need — but what is unsaid is unsaid).
What you get out of your education is what you put in. I am not asking you to give up Google or to swear off all AI use, but I do want you to think about your education a little more than in terms of what it gets you, to be a little more than just another good little soldier.
