Essays

In American education, the 5 paragraph essay format has been used to allow writing to become part of standardized testing. It does not teach how to write well, nor does it teach kids why they should want to write kids (the only reason it gives them is getting a good grade, which society views as highly important).

As Cory Doctorow writes, this is what leads kids to using LLMs to write essays - they're being asked to write formulaicly (like an LLM does well) and for no reason beyond getting a good grade (because otherwise they'd want to write it themselves).

He proposes something like graduate level seminars, where small groups of people regularly create essays and critique the others in the group, and he discusses how it's the critique of others’ works that actually does a lot of the heavy lifting in learning.

That solution makes me think of the motivations behind the constructionist theory of education, which also encourages “learning in public”. If you're interested in that kind of learning, I encourage you to look into digital gardening. In theory, from there you could create the structured seminar style alternative by finding a couple other gardeners and virtually meeting up regularly to discuss and critique new writings, although I'm not positive how well that would mesh with the digital garden ethos. Personally, I “learn in public” by reading a lot of articles (and browsing the small web!) and, when I find something interesting or that makes me think about it more, I write down my own thoughts here. This allows ideas to be continously reiterated and topics that I think about more regularly continue growing.