Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym?
As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward.
When I’m in New York, I take spin classes on the Upper East Side. The students—it’s a class, after all—pack into a dark, humid room. The music is loud. The air reeks of effort. When the black light hits, our towels fluoresce. “I can do that!” we shout, answering the instructor’s call. Everyone is working.
It is not especially pleasant. It is not supposed to be. We have chosen, quite deliberately, to subject ourselves to forty-five minutes of physical discomfort for benefits accrued down the road: better health, greater strength, a future version of ourselves that will justify the soreness tomorrow morning. Moreover, we are doing this by engaging in an activity that, in the real world, we might very well avoid because there are perfectly good machines to do it for us. A car or an e-bike can more easily get you from point A to point B. Yet no one in the class doubts that what we are doing is necessary. No one would dream of outsourcing it. It wouldn’t make sense.
I’ve been thinking about that room a lot lately, because I spend most of my professional life in a different kind of room entirely—the university classroom—and, as with the spin class, we now have machines that can do much of what we ask students to do in the name of training. Unlike with spinning, the effect has been to call the whole enterprise into question. Rather than “I can do that!,” the refrain I hear most often from students and colleagues is: “Why are we doing that?” I’m starting to think that the gym, of all places, might have some answers.
I teach mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth, and, on the first day of a large introductory course, I always ask the students to tell me, by a show of hands, how many of them are skilled at a sport or an instrument. It’s usually all of them. I ask whether they had to practice to become good, a question that is met with lots of nodding and a hum of general assent. The same is true for math, I tell them, and by extension for critical thinking, for writing, for argument. They nod. They understand the analogy immediately and completely.
