There’s a joyous little romp in the current New Yorker. It’s a review of a book from the reviewer’s childhood. The review is called “What a sixty-five-year-old book teaches us about A.I.” Those last two initials stand for “Artificial Intelligence” in case you weren’t sure. The book in question? “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” With a New Yorker subscription, you can read all about it, here. For the rest of y’all, details are below.
What makes this relevant right now is that the machine foretold years ago in a kids’ book has come to actual fruition with the recent release of ChatGPT. Threatening to upend higher – and lower – education, the good/bad news is that latter-day plagiarists at all levels now have access to a revolutionary time-saving tool that promises to take all the sweat out of writing term papers, essays, or even – heaven help us all! – PhD theses.
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There was once a time back in the deep mists of history when a grocery store clerk would punch in the price of each item on your shopping list to a cash register keypad instead of just infrared scanning a UPC code. There was also a time when you had to go inside a bank lobby to have the teller count out your cash for a withdrawal. A time when retrieving a book at the local library required at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System. When, to spell-check a document, you actually had to flip open a musty hard-copy of Funk & Wagnalls or Merriam-Webster. And there was even a time when you couldn’t pump your own gas, fercryinoutloud. Well, brothers and sisters, those days are gone. And I for one couldn’t be happier.
Denizens of the various teaching professions may feel differently about this new chatbot technology, of course. Lord knows if I was the one assigning the homework I might be worried too. But not overly worried. Why? The end of the book review tells the tale. And when it comes right down to it, I’m not above a little casual plagiarism myself. So, read on – if you dare.
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“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” is ostensibly about computers. But it also makes an argument about homework. In a note at the beginning of the book, <the authors> write, “In all fairness to both Professor Bullfinch and Danny, we wish to point out that their position on homework is supported by Bulletin 1248-3 of the Educational Service Bureau, University of Pennsylvania.”
I haven’t managed to turn up a copy of that bulletin, which was called “What About Homework?,” but I’ve found a number of other publications, from multiple decades, that arrive at what I assume are similar conclusions. For example, in 2007 the education critic Alfie Kohn — whose many books include “The Homework Myth,” published in 2018 — wrote that “there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school,” and that in high school “the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.”
One problem with homework is that it inevitably encourages the counterproductive over-involvement of parents. (When my kids were young, I suggested to one of their teachers that he conduct a science fair for fathers only.) There’s also the issue of homework whose sole purpose is to squeeze in material that should have been covered during the school day but wasn’t. Miss Arnold offers precisely that justification for some of her huge assignments: The size of her class has nearly doubled because of rapid population growth in town, therefore she is no longer able to give individual students as much attention as she once did.
Miss Arnold also assigns homework for a suspect reason that’s described in a paper published under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Education, in 1988: “Punishing assignments exercise the teacher’s power to use up time at home that would otherwise be under the student’s control. The assignments often center on behavior rather than academic skills, and stress embarrassment rather than mastery.”
That’s what she was up to with all those sentences she made Danny write back in the first book in the series. Luckily for everyone, Danny handled his embarrassment with aplomb by writing most of the sentences during downtime in outer space. The mindlessness of the exercise did no permanent harm to his imagination. At the end of “Homework Machine”, he suddenly has “a strange, wild look in his eyes, and a faraway smile on his lips.” He says, “This is just a simple idea I had: Listen, what about a teaching machine. . . .”
