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Back to School with AI

Back to School with AI

Last updated on: August 21, 2026 at 7:46 am by Gene Veith

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Back to School with AI 2026-08-21T07:46:57-04:00 Gene Veith

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Summer vacation is winding down, so the nation shifts its mindset to “Back to School!” From kindergarten to graduate school, students are stocking up on everything they will need for the new school year. For many, that will include AI apps to do their assignments for them.

My daughter Joanna Hensley (grown and a teacher herself) alerted me to an article on a local news site here in St. Louis by John Gerding with the headline SLU students amped for new year, talk AI during move-in day.

The reporter is asking students moving into the dorms at St. Louis University about AI. The students he quotes really are “talking AI,” as in talking like AI.

For example, one new freshman (I am redacting names) tells about how her high school English classes used AI:

“Our teachers tried really hard, especially like when you get to like English, where you’re writing essays in those like trying to integrate AI,” said [redacted], a SLU freshman. She expects more of the same at SLU.

I checked the story with two AI-detectors and both of them assured me that it is 100% human-written. Of course it is, since AI would edit out the three “likes,” though the sentence still wouldn’t make sense.

Then the reporter quoted a third-year student:

“Last year, all of the professors had to incorporate AI in some capacity,” said [redacted], SLU junior. “So, my accounting professor made a podcast as a study tool, or we had assignments where we had to utilize it. So they’re really leaning into making us have the tools so that we can use it in the future, which I think is.”

First of all, St. Louis University is requiring all professors to incorporate AI? The great media scholar Walter J. Ong, who taught at SLU, as well as all of his fellow Jesuits who founded the school, must be rolling over in their graves. “A major concern of Ong’s works,” says Wikipedia, “is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education.” Now, judging from this article, the shift is going in reverse, from literacy back to orality!

With literacy, Ong showed, came greater rationality, but, once again, this quotation does not constitute a connected thought. It doesn’t make sense, either logically or grammatically (“which I think is?”).

My first thought, though, was not to criticize the students but to criticize the reporter for writing something like this. My second thought was to wonder, where was the editor?

But then I realized, reporters always clean up the quotations from the people they interview. The only time they don’t is when they want the person they interviewed to look bad. So maybe the reporter, with the collusion of his editor, did this intentionally. I talked this over, via text, with my daughter.

Joanna: “I think the journalist must be making a statement.”

Me: “But what is the statement? That it’s OK for them to use AI since students are so bad without it? Or the opposite?” That is to say, is he making an anti-AI statement in a pro-AI story he was assigned to write? Is he showing why students need AI, because they don’t have intelligence of their own or know how to use language coherently? Or is he showing why they must not use AI, because they need to cultivate their own intelligence and learn how to use language coherently?

Joanna: “My take is: English teachers have failed their students so badly by encouraging AI that the students can neither write nor speak in a coherent manner, and neither teacher nor student has the reasoning skills to identify AI as the problem. That makes sense to me since writing is thinking. Without going through the hard process of organizing thoughts into words, a person just doesn’t think well, write well, or apparently speak well. Not that people necessarily need to speak well all the time. I just want people to make sense. This young college freshman has important things to say, but no tools to say them!”

[She then appended a screen shot of a newspaper clipping that quoted her classically-educated 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son–my grandchildren!–who described the toppling of the historic KFUO radio tower near the seminary with vividness, lyricism, and insight. She commented, “Not to brag, but come on.”]

Joanna: “The journalist might be saying, college is doomed and journalism is doomed. Look what my editor let me write!”

And education is doomed, I would add, since these students’ high school English classes taught them to use AI for their writing and their thinking, and now their highly-ranked university is going to continue that instruction at a higher level.

Illustration: University student with a laptop via VectorPortal.com, CC by 4.0

contemporary education

journalism

St. Louis University

Walter J. Ong

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