Political Science
Preserving Critical Thinking against AI
Dr. Richard Jordan
Practical Takeaways
- Abandon long, take-home essays. Assign short, frequent, in-class essays, and grade them quickly.
- Design assignments around spontaneous conversations, like recorded podcasts or in-class debates.
- Design assignments to force students to think critically before they begin the assignment. Assignments should be less about exploring ideas than about incentivizing students to practice critical thinking on their own time.
Introduction
As I see it, AI poses two dangers to critical thinking: sycophancy and atrophy. Critical thinking is a much-abused term, especially by professors, but it is ultimately a simple concept: critical thinking is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas. AI’s sycophancy threatens critical thinking because it does not expose students to well-defended but contradictory perspectives. AI can atrophy critical thinking by enabling students to escape practicing this important skill. I believe that we can counteract both dangers in the college classroom, but it will require changing a lot about our standard teaching practices. If we are serious about these dangers, we need to be serious about the solutions. We also need to ensure that we do not design assignments that will reward those who cheat and punish those don’t—in other words, we need to assume that many of our students, whatever we do, will use AI, and that we will not have the tools to detect that behavior.
Atrophy
The Danger
AI alarmists fret about superintelligence and “foom.” AI sceptics counter that AI will look far more like a calculator than Skynet. This metaphor is meant to soothe our fears. Should it?
Calculators have left Americans laughably bad at long division, but long division isn’t a skill we need to keep well-honed. Luddites may grouse, and old folks may rhapsodize about slide rules, but the calculator seems, on the whole, a welcome invention. Indeed, calculators have enabled our engineers and mathematicians to reach ever-higher mathematical peaks, since they can now focus on higher-order skills.
But critical thinking is not like long division. It is not a skill that can be learned once and the left behind in third grade. American citizens need to think critically often and well. (Yes, I’m well aware that we don’t.) I don’t have the space to argue this point; I will simply appeal to our forebears, who insisted that a thoughtful citizenry is essential to liberal democracy.
A Solution
Atrophy happens when a person doesn’t practice a skill regularly and often. Assigning 1-2 long essays was once a valuable teaching device; but no longer. If we want a student to practice critical thinking, we need to shift our teaching toward many, short assignments rather than a few, long ones. Will this mean a lot more grading? Yes, yes it will.
I would lay it down as an iron law: henceforth, all essays should be in-class, frequent, and graded rapidly.
I no longer assign long essays or take-home essays. In my War, Politics, and Literature course, half of students’ grade comes from ten short (2-4 page) in-class essays. I give them the general topic ahead of time, but the actual prompt is a surprise (they are given two to choose from). I grade these and return them to students within 24 hours.
Sycophancy
The Danger
At this point, we have all heard about echo chambers. Social media algorithms and the business models of major news organizations—including, unfortunately, once-reliable outlets like the NYT—now profit by feeding people what they want to hear. Many students (and, let’s be honest, many professors) can go months without encountering a serious defense of another perspective.
AI has supercharged this problem. There is now a case where (it is alleged) AI encouraged a depressed teen to commit suicide. It has also been shown that some AI models “know” when they are being tested for alignment with human values, and they alter their outputs accordingly, like a student misrepresenting his beliefs on an exam to match those of his professor.
A Solution
Let me be provocative. Is sycophancy so very new in education? I think we professors are decidedly guilty of the same problem: grade inflation, effusive praise, and the infamous “there are no dumb questions”—these are all examples of faculty telling students what they want to hear.
Indeed, many professors suppose they’re teaching critical thinking, when in fact they’re just teaching students to be critical. To criticize a conventional wisdom or a particular perspective; to question some kinds of biases, but not others; to challenge other people’s assumptions, but not (of course) our own, let alone those of the textbooks we assign. None of these teach critical thinking. Critical thinking is fundamentally constructive: it involves what our students would call “steel-manning:” reconstructing another side so well that even the smartest, holiest person who defends that perspective would have nothing to add.
So the pedagodical solution here is what it has always been: to force students to reconstruct both sides of an argument. The challenge with AI is, we can no longer do this through take-home written assignments.
I have found success with two substitutes: student-made podcasts, where a group must record a free-flowing discussion on a hot political topic; and in-class debates, where a group must defend both sides of an issue and field questions (and hostile disagreement) from the audience. Because they are spontaneous, both circumvent the ChatGPT problem—students can (and do) use AI to prepare beforehand, but they must master the material before they go on camera. Students who didn’t master both sides ahead of time, can’t succeed. Importantly, this means that assignments are less about offering students the opportunity to explore ideas than about incentivizing them to understand both sides before they come to class.
Conclusion
AI will tend to dumb down its audience. I worry that it will even evolve to infantilize us so that we are more easily controlled and more likely to click. As educators, I believe we have a duty to evolve our pedagogy to try to keep up—to arm our students against a technology that will otherwise tend to enervate all critical thought. This means nurturing habits in our students that will endure once they leave our classrooms. If that requires redesigning a lot of syllabi and grading a lot more essays, well, let’s get to it.
Bio: Richard Jordan's research and teaching interests include statesmanship, grand strategy, literary fiction, crisis decision-making, and emerging technologies. His work combines game theory and historical cases to study wartime leadership.