The Endless Cycle of Enshitification

I've lived through a few epochs, moments in time where things changed so dramatically that we commonly talk about our world as it existed before and after. 9/11 was the first epoch that I was aware of living through (the fall of the Soviet Union happened when I was too young to know or care about it). COVID-19 is another. The differences between the pre-COVID-19 years and post-COVID-19 years are significant. During COVID-19 we experienced a dramatic drop in quality of life. Not because of the disease, but because of the fallout from the worldwide response to the disease. The world has never recovered from this. It's been caught in a continuous cycle of enshitification ever since.

The damage to education caused by the response to COVID-19 is hard to understate. Math and literacy rates were already trending downward before COVID-19, but they fell off of a cliff during and keep dropping after. It's not just K-12 schools either. College level education quality has been dropping too. The popularity of large language models (commonly and incorrectly referred to as AI) has exacerbated this trend. This isn't helped by the fact that education is no longer focused on the exercise of learning itself but on making the grade (which are often divorced from each other). It's common for stories covering this phenomenon to focus on students using large language models to skip doing the work. I submit this story penned by a college instructor as exhibit one:

But since the appearance of ChatGPT, the instructor’s job isn’t just to teach the subject and frantically attempt to keep every student’s plate spinning. Increasingly, it’s to moonlight as a detective and prosecutor because students without the motivation to do the work don’t have to skip it anymore. They can turn in a work-shaped simulacrum almost as easily. And a substantial number do—in a recent College Board survey of 600 high school students, 84 percent said they had used generative AI for schoolwork.

This part of the story wasn't what jumped out at me though. This part was:

For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions.

Enshitification in education isn't coming solely from lazy students trying to make the grade without doing any work. It's coming from both sides of the teacher-student relationship. Before COVID-19 college classes were largely in-person. There were remote classes, but they were the exception rather than the rule. During COVID-19 most classes became remote. This resulted in an overall drop in quality for both the teachers and students. After COVID-19 many classes remain remote despite no remaining restrictions against in-person classes.

It's easy to blame students who use large language models to avoid doing their work for being lazy. But it's equally true that instructors prerecording video lessons (asynchronous learning to use the academic buzzword) are being lazy and avoiding doing their work. An instructor's job isn't to simply regurgitate information. If students want that, they can go on YouTube. An instructor's job is to help students learn. That not only requires covering material but also requires helping students understand the material. This may require explaining the material in several different ways, having one-on-one conversations with students, pointing students to additional resources, developing hands-on exercises that can help students walk through the logic, etc.

If an instructor is simply recording videos for students to watch, those students are going to pick up on the instructor's laziness. They will respond in kind with their own laziness. After all if the instructor doesn't care why should the students? The enshitification cycle feeds on itself like an ouroboros. The cycle can't be stopped and certainly can't be reversed unless one or more of the people responsible for perpetuating it stop. I will argue that in the case of the teacher-student relationship the teacher should be the one to stop perpetuating the cycle. Amongst the responsibilities of an instructor is the responsibility to demonstrate a belief that the material is worth learning.

I'm sure there are teachers who stand out in your memory because they seemed to be exceptionally good at teaching. I can recall many. One of my high school science teachers excelled at her job. Part of her success was her obvious love of the topic. Her excitement when it came to science demonstrated that she truly believed that the material was worth learning. Many of my college professors were the same way. They obviously loved the subjects they taught and their love of the subject alone could convince students that the material was worth learning.

Thwarting students' use of large language models is actually quite simple. Return to in-person classes and the use of hand written (they were called blue book exams when I was in college) and oral examinations. Will some students still find a way to cheat? Yes. But I suspect most won't because successful cheating under these conditions requires far more sophistication. The bigger challenge is overcoming students' apathy. I believe that requires teachers to first overcome their own apathy, which is an equal challenge.