Publisher: The Appalachian
“OPINION: AI has no place in curricula” is a stupid, chest‑thumping title that disqualifies itself on impact. Education isn’t binary, and anyone who opens with “no place” is either grandstanding or clueless. It’s clickbait absolutism standing in for thinking.
The piece itself is worse. It reads like a sanctimonious little screed, pure performative Luddism wrapped in freshman bravado. Anna Kate Mock throws a tantrum on the page, and The Appalachian waved it through anyway. You can practically smell the cognitive dissonance. They preach human originality while slapping a clumsily Photoshopped header on a layout with the visual polish of a middle‑school newsletter that screams “we gave up on design.” Emotional theater, not analysis.
The logic is a cardboard cutout. It sets up a false choice where either students do everything the hard way or their brains melt because a tool exists. We’ve been here before with calculators, spellcheck, and search. Educators adapt assessments. Competent ones, at least. Meanwhile the piece blesses AI for lesson planning but bans it in curricula, like magic hypocrisy lines enforce themselves. No mechanism, no criteria, nothing beyond vibes.
The sourcing is a joke. Trendy citations are waved like talismans, never integrated into an argument. One of the linked “proofs” is about logistics automation, not pedagogy. That’s not nuance; that’s an editorial face‑plant. If you want to claim students “trade critical thinking” for convenience, bring data. Classrooms, cohorts, outcomes. The article offers none. It caricatures the pro‑AI stance (“you can’t stop the sun from coming up”) instead of engaging the obvious point that employers use these tools and grads need to function around them.
Pedagogically, it’s naïve. If AI can produce plausible text, you change what you assess and teach students to interrogate outputs. Pretending campus can be a sanctuary from pervasive tools is sentimental fluff that collapses the minute graduates hit the real world. Ignored benefits aren’t minor either. Accessibility for neurodivergent students. Scalable feedback. Drafting support that actually helps weaker writers iterate. The piece pretends these don’t exist because they don’t fit the sermon.
Style matches substance. Moralizing, repetition, zero methodological rigor, and anecdote‑heavy hand‑waving. Lots of “human pulse” platitudes, no operational detail. If you’re going to swing this hard, you need evidence, not vibes stapled to a scare line.
Congrats to author and publisher alike. You produced an alarmist, shallow puff piece that will get quoted in faculty meetings as Exhibit A for why your newsroom shouldn’t be trusted with actual discourse. The title is dishonest, the argument incoherent, and the sourcing sloppy. That’s not a position; it’s a posture.
