On: AI is becoming more common in uni courses. What can students gain and what...

Trinity, this 8th of September, 2026

The universities are asking what students gain and lose when a machine takes the tutor’s place. They put the question to the machine itself, I suspect, and were satisfied with the answer. That is the first error.

The quotation before me says the machine may produce the same words as a teacher, yet the interaction is not the same. True, but too gently put. The words are not the instruction; the words are the residue of instruction. When a mineralogist teaches a pupil to distinguish feldspar from quartz, the value lies not in the sentences but in the correction - the pupil’s wrong guess met, resisted, and reshaped by a mind that was itself once wrong. A machine that answers every question perfectly removes the resistance, and resistance is the whole mechanism. One learns to swim in water that pushes back.

I would also insist on naming. They call this a teaching tool. It is not a tool; a tool extends the hand. It is a substitute for the sparring partner, and sparring partners cannot be substituted by anything that never tires of you, never disagrees from conviction, never reveals by its own confusion where the real difficulty lies. My best lectures were the ones that went badly - the question I could not answer showed me where my induction was a ladder of cards.

And there is a deeper loss. The student who consults the machine receives the conclusion without the climb. But the climb was the education. To be handed the summit is to be stranded on it, unable to say how one arrived, and therefore unable to descend or defend the ground.

Let them keep the machines for the drudgery - the tables, the translations, the cataloguing. But the tutorial, the argument at the dining table, the wrong answer patiently dismantled: these they must guard as one guards a foundation. Remove them, and whatever is built above will look splendid and bear no weight.