Meanderings, 6 December 2025
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Cardinal virtues
10 min read
The article extensively discusses the four cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice) in the context of AI ethics and Christian education. Understanding their philosophical and theological origins would deepen comprehension of the virtue-based argument against uncritical AI adoption.
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Circadian rhythm
14 min read
The article references organizing daily routines around circadian rhythms and biology for health and productivity. Understanding the science behind circadian rhythms would provide valuable context for the health advice section.
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Factory model school
12 min read
Steven Mintz's critique centers on universities operating 'like factories' with mass lectures and standardized prompts. This Wikipedia article on the factory model of education provides historical context for why this industrial approach emerged and its ongoing critique.
First Meanderings of the last month of 2025. Advent. Christmas. New Year. Here we go!
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
AI reveals the system is broken:
When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched.
In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn’t a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis.
For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants.
Question: If you were a young professor, what would you do?
Professors have called this mentorship, he said, but it’s really “industrialized education,” he wrote in a more detailed Substack post on the topic. And AI, he believes, has simply revealed how hollow that model had become.
“Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do — and often do it better,” Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. “When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the assignment.”
In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is obsolete because it tests exactly what AI now excels at — research, understanding context, and constructing and developing an argument.
“AI can now do all that,” he said.
As a result, he said he has moved away from essays done outside class and toward forms of assessment that demonstrate visible learning, including in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions.
There should be “no outside of class graded assignments. Assessment will be based exclusively on activities that can be observed in person,” he said.
Mintz envisions a system where AI handles what he called “mastery learning” — basic facts, chronology, and conceptual frameworks — freeing students to focus on what he described as “inquiry learning”: asking students to pose questions and construct complex arguments.
...What is at stake here, in other words, is a question of virtue: Does this tool lead us away from or toward being God’s good creatures? This is what I’d failed to communicate in the syllabus.
Virtue is not where we’re used to beginning conversations about tools. We’re much more used to asking whether a tool does the job. But not
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