Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Entering an unfamiliar classroom for the first time, met by a cacophony of greetings, shuffles, and the flutter of unsettled nerves, a student experiences a particular strain of vertigo — a a kind of thrownness. Unbalanced, she glances about, wondering if her fresh peers are already friends, if they know or care more about the subject than she does, if the professor will command attention or beg for it. She wonders also about the subject — how it will stretch or resist or entice her; and what personal qualities, as well as intellectual qualities, she ought to bring to her studenthood. She must wait for an internal order to develop, and for the nerves to slow gently into a new rhythm. The experience catapults her from the grooves of ordinary life. She has the sensation of a swift transit.  That is what learning is meant to do. The developments that will occur in that homely but exotic room over those few months ought to confuse, not confirm, her. Each time she enters the classroom she must again try to recapture the vertigo and recover the instability — to distance herself from herself. She cannot learn, or learn well, if she conceives of that place and those hours as a sphere in which to calcify who she already is. Alienation is essential to study. The classroom is a community of the alienated. Genuine learning demands courage and adventure. The room must be a realm apart, a space with a strange energy and a different gravity — a foreign country, populated by real and imagined strangers. Discomfort is its air. The comfort of one’s own couch, then, is a bad place to set up school. And so the question is begged: Is remote learning possible? Is the setting of study a matter of indifference to the activity of study? The question was relevant before Covid19 bleakly introduced the age of Zoom. In the United States over the past fifteen years, enrollment in online courses has more than quadrupled. This trend, the success of which was meteoric, was a response to the equally monumental and endlessly mounting cost of college for the average student. In America, higher education now costs students thirteen times what it did forty years ago, and that price has swelled while state funding for public universities has decreased. As tuition has risen, returns on investment have dropped. The pioneers of MOOCs — “mass open online courses,” for those born too late to remember the old country in which they required introduction — explained that this disconnection is due to the uselessness of traditional curricula for the contemporary workforce and the “revolution in work.” All this reading and writing, all this training in thought — all this humanistic exploration — seemed impractical, and practicality has increasingly become the standard of judgement. If not for a job, then for what? And so they developed cheaper, skills-based models. Those models are online, a “convenience” which proclaims that the classroom, like the libraries cluttering university campuses, is redundant, and even archaic. For years now, Coursera has offered a fully online master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in computer and information technology for one-third of the cost of the on-campus version. MIT boasts a supply chain management degree which begins with an online segment on edX (a global non-profit founded in 2012 by Harvard and MIT). Similarly, Arizona State University’s Global Freshman Academy kicks off with a virtual first year. In both the Arizona State and MIT programs students complete the initial leg of their degree online and then are invited to apply for the on-campus portion at a fraction of its usual price. edX, like most similar platforms, considers education the process through which students are armed with tools to earn money. From its website: “[we are] transforming traditional education, removing the barriers of cost, location and access…. [our students are] learners at every state, whether entering the job market, changing fields, seeking a promotion or exploring new interests.” It tells us “edX is where you go to learn.” A professionalized application of the term, to be sure;