Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

I wonder how this will contribute to our current declining literacy rates in a social climate that's already rife with anti-intellectualism and isolation. Even if this worked well, it appears to be to be a step backwards.

Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.

In that case the problem isn’t what technology we do or do not introduce. A society that values literacy isn’t going to be duped by a demo and a blog post. However a society which does not value understanding, expertise, or teachers will take every opportunity to shortcut them.

Cultural obituaries are often premature, and the one for literacy is no exception. A nascent contrary impulse is emerging: readers deliberately turning to long-form works as a form of intellectual resistance. I’ve been working through Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy and Tom Heehler’s The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, not just to expand vocabulary but to restore the sinew of productive speech.

That project led me to conscript AI as a private tutor. With custom instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini now surface new words and nudge my prose toward clarity, turning a vague fear of erosion into conviction. A dedicated subset of users will inevitably harness such tools to strengthen their expressive range and communicative precision.

Until recently, my writing rarely left emails and journals. Now, with AI as scaffold and sparring partner, I draft short stories from my own life and recast them in the voices of authors I admire. This feels less like a technology poised to supplant teachers, and more like the substrate for a renaissance in autodidactic education.

Going by the atrocious salary expectation for teaching (which i firmly place as one of, if not the most, fundamentally important jobs in modern society) i think we've already established where we land on this.

And note how i didn't mention a country; i think this is a widespread issue beyond country borders currently.

My only other frame of reference is China where being a teacher is a very respectable and competitive job with good wages. (Software engineering is way less prestigious interestingly.) They even have a national holiday for teachers. So it would be essentially unthinkable for a tech company to drop a demo that threatens teachers.

> teacher is a very respectable and competitive job with good wages

My frame of reference is europe and America. I suspect more of asia than just china mirrors that respect, as education feels nearly unhealthily emphasised.

The so called advanced world that prosper on innovation, design and R&D is skimpimg on the very thing that is supposed to be our advantage. Its frustrating.