Cannot Read? Students Cannot Imagine Either
August 8, 2025
Students are losing the ability to imagine and self-reflect on their own lives says the HuffPost in the article: “I Asked My Students To Write An Essay About Their Lives. The Reason 1 Student Began To Panic Left Me Stunned.” While Millennials were the first generation to be completely engrossed in the Internet, Generation Z is the first generation to have never lived without screens. Because of the Internet’s constant presence, kids have unfortunately developed bad habits where they zone out and don’t think.
Zen masters work for years to shut off their brains, but Gen Z can do it automatically with a screen. This is a horrible thing for critical thinking skills and imagination, because these kids don’t know how to think without the assistance of AI. The article writer Liz Rose Shulman is a teacher of high school and college students. She assigned them essays and without hesitation all of them rely on AI to complete the assignments.
The students either use Grammarly to help them write everything or the rely on ChatGPT to generate an essay. The over reliance on AI tools means they don’t know how to use their brains. They’re unfamiliar with the standard writing process, problem solving, and being creative. The kids don’t believe there’s a problem using AI. Many teachers also believe the same thing and are adopting it into their curriculums.
The students are flummoxed when they’re asked to write about themselves:
I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else.
One of my students began to panic.
‘I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,’ she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, ‘A time when someone believed in you.’ ‘It’s about you,’ I told her. ‘You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.’ It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.”
What’s even worse is that kids are addicted to their screens and they lack basic communication skills. Every generations goes through issues with older generations. Society will adapt and survive but let’s start teaching how to think and imagine again! Maybe if they brought back recess and enforced time without screens that would help, even with older people.
Whitney Grace, August 8, 2025
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