A headline caught my eye: “ChatGPT is in classrooms. How should educators now assess student learning?”
And my immediate response was: why should we assess student learning at all?
Why are we still treating education like a competitive sport—like a game with gatekeepers—where someone in authority decides what counts as “knowing,” then measures students against it?
Because if we’re honest, “assessment” often hides a deeper assumption:
What I want you to learn is more important than what you want to learn.
Educational democracy: the student’s learning belongs to the student
In the programs we’re building at aibia, we don’t use grades. We don’t “assess” student work in the usual sense.
We read it. We respond to it. We give feedback designed to challenge the work, stretch it, deepen it, and push it beyond where it already is.
The goal is not compliance. The goal is independent thought.
Our classrooms—and our field-based programs—are designed so students can follow their own ideas, their own critiques, their own questions: the things that genuinely stand out to them, the things that matter to them, the things they can build a life around.
This is what we’re calling educational democracy.
And it’s grounded in a method we call critical reimaginative theory where we move beyond critique, and start reimaging answers to those critiques, and asking what it would mean to rebuild the world differently—then practice that rebuilding in real places, with real people, in real constraints.
The real problem isn’t AI. It’s that academia won’t interrogate its foundations.
The article itself is smart in the way it talks about generative AI as a classroom reality. It makes useful points about the “post-plagiarism” situation—how education may need to move beyond panicked policing and into clearer expectations, process-based learning, and preserving student voice.
But what struck me is what almost nobody says out loud:
We keep starting from the same old foundation, as if it’s unquestionable.
- Why are we demanding they learn what we want them to learn?
- Why are we demanding they become who we want them to become?
- Why do we treat knowledge like something we “own,” then distribute downward?
- Why are we assessing students?
Universities don’t control knowledge anymore—and that’s not a tragedy
Take something like the Peloponnesian War.
Students don’t need a university class just to access information about it. They can look it up in seconds. They’ll read Wikipedia. Watch a documentary. Pull up a timeline. Or ask an AI system for a quick overview and engage in a real time dialog about it.
And you know what?
That may be all the knowledge they actually need about it.
If what we’re offering is mostly controlled access to information, then yes—AI makes us obsolete. But the deeper reality is: the internet already did that.
The question is what education is for when information is everywhere.
“It’s just theory” is the most revealing insult in modern education
I once had a friend dismiss what I was doing by saying: “Who cares? It’s just theory.” He’d gone into an MBA/accounting pathway. For him, learning was mostly about qualification—proof that someone can do a job.
Fair enough: there are areas where demonstration matters—coding, medicine, engineering, accounting, trades—where competence has real consequences and you need credible signals of capability. But that’s not what most of higher education pretends to be.
So much of what we “teach” is ideas. Frameworks. Interpretation. Ethics. Politics. Meaning. Critique. And in those spaces, the obsession with assessment often turns learning into compliance: learn what I assign, write what I recognize, mirror what I reward.
Assignments often fail because they start from the wrong authority
We hand students an assignment and say: “Write 2,000 words on X.” But maybe they don’t care about X. Maybe X has no emotional gravity for them. Maybe it doesn’t connect to their life, their struggles, their hopes, their questions.
So what are we doing?
We’re telling them what they’re supposed to be interested in. Then we act surprised when they disengage—or when they use the easiest tool available to produce something “acceptable.”
That’s not a student failure. That’s a design failure.
AI makes the old gatekeeping model look even more absurd
The more powerful generative AI becomes, the more obvious it is that the old model was already collapsing:
- Students can access information instantly.
- They can explore philosophies they were never taught.
- They can self-direct at a level that was impossible 30 years ago.
- All in real time, and in dialog with an authoritative source they have a relationship with
When I was growing up, nobody ever taught me anarchism as a serious tradition. I got the negative caricature: bombs, chaos, disorder. Yet, today, a student hears the word once and can learn the entire intellectual history in an afternoon—thinkers, movements, debates, critiques, variations.
So who are we to pretend that at the doorway of a university classroom, students suddenly must learn what we decree?
Post-plagiarism isn’t a crisis. It’s a mirror.
If “plagiarism” feels like an existential threat, it’s because learning has been commodified. Plagiarism is what happens when education becomes a product, and student work becomes a credentialing artifact, and “success” becomes something you chase for approval.
But if the goal is the learner’s journey toward meaning—toward becoming a fully fledged, independent, autonomous self—then the question changes.
It becomes less: “Who wrote this sentence?”
And more: “What did you learn? What did you struggle with? What changed in you? What can you now see, do, or imagine that you couldn’t before?”
That’s why I don’t hear “post-plagiarism” as scary. I hear it as a chance to finally admit the truth:
We should have been building education for learning all along—not for policing.
Let the dinosaur go
There’s a line in the “post-plagiarism” framing that sticks with me: it’s not about panic, it’s about rethinking what it means to learn and demonstrate knowledge in a world where human cognition interacts with digital systems.
Exactly.
But let’s go further. If we keep trying to force AI into the old assessment regime, we’re basically trying to keep a dinosaur alive. And anybody who’s seen Jurassic Park knows: holding onto the dinosaur is not the best thing...
Let it go.
Let students run free—not in chaos, but in responsibility. Stop treating education as competition, conflict, and gatekeeping. Start treating it as facilitation: helping people become more capable of thinking, judging, imagining, and building.
Educational democracy means the student’s learning belongs to the student.
And in a world where knowledge is everywhere, that’s not idealism.
That's just simply the new rules of the game...
