, I began to see myself as crippled in the use of myself (just as a great violinist would play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad). My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination—it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me?
Stirling believed that the art was ‘in’ the child, and that it wasn’t something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: ‘This is good, this is bad …’ ‘But supposing a child wants to learn how to draw a tree?’ ‘Send him out to look at one. Let him climb one. Let him touch it.’
Building tools that mirror human thought introduces a paradox: the same systems designed to aid knowing can remove the pathways to discovering it. Education already narrows the openness to structureless idea exploration; AI tools risk compounding that by turning play into production rather than letting abundance fuel unstructured creative thinking.am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block … One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them. This is unknown as the virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of others … To know yet to think that one does not know is best … The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not
Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school—hence the misbehaviour. I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I’d never seen any examples of children’s writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!). By far the best work came from the ‘ineducable’ ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer
Stripping learners of the agency to use tools that help them explore ideas may reduce boredom, but it also forecloses new modes of learning. The deeper question is whether tools like AI can open pathways for divergent, creative thought — not just eliminating boredom but reframing attention itself as an act of exploration.Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like Edison’s, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically.
Students will arrive with many techniques for avoiding the pain of failure. John Holt’s How Children Fail (Penguin, 1969; Pitman, 1970) gives examples of children learning to get round problems, rather than learning to find solutions to problems. If you screw your face up and bite on your pencil to show you’re ‘trying’, the teacher may write out the answer for you. (In my school, if you sat relaxed and thought, you were likely to get swiped on the back of the head.) I explain to the students the devices they’re using
This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they ‘fail’ and it’s expected to bring greater rewards if they ‘win’. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them.
Getting an AI to think through a problem is not the same as helplessness — it is asking the tool to build its own context. The question is whether offloading the struggle to an AI removes the productive friction of working through problems, or whether it creates a new kind of collaborative problem-solving that has its own value.If I’m playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain. A very gentle smack that he perceives as ‘serious’ will have him howling in agony. A hard ‘play’ slap may make him laugh. When I want to work and he wants me to continue playing he will give very strong ‘I am playing’ signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way but most teachers are afraid to give ‘I am playing’ signals to their students. If they would, their
An AI builds mental models of what the user is planning or implementing — not to manipulate but to figure out how to be helpful. Sycophancy is undesired mirroring: the AI reflecting what it thinks the user wants to hear. But the more interesting possibility is an AI that reads signals well enough to draw something out of the user, the way a good improvisation partner elicits responses rather than merely agreeing.If I’m trying to lower my end of the see-saw, and my mind blocks, I can always switch to raising the other end. That is, I can achieve a similar effect by saying ‘I smell beautiful’ as ‘You stink’. I therefore teach actors to switch between raising themselves and lowering their partners in alternate sentences; and vice versa. Good playwrights also add variety in this way. For example, look at the opening of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself. The remarks on status are mine. SGANARELLE: [Raises himself.] No, I tell you I’ll have nothing to do with it and it’s for me to say, I’m the master.
When playwright roles were more broadly accessible, the culture had a richer understanding of the dynamics of play. In an era where creative tools are again becoming ungated — where collaboration is no longer gatekept by position — a similar democratization may deepen collective experience of creativity.preferred status; that they like to be low, or high, and that they try to manoeuvre themselves into the preferred positions. A person who plays high status is saying ‘Don’t come near me, I bite.’ Someone who plays low status is saying ‘Don’t bite me, I’m not worth the trouble.’ In either case the status played is a defence, an
