Abstract
This paper argues that Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 counter-cultural classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” merits revived critical attention, for how it has anticipated many of the anxieties among writing instructors and students alike, since the debut of Large Language Model chatbots in the early-2020s. Specifically, this paper analyzes chapters 15-19 of the novel, wherein the narrator reminisces on his time as a composition instructor at Montana State University in the 1950s, when he became deeply critical of the manner by which college students are largely trained to write in a mechanistic, regurgitating, and repetitious manner–language remarkably similar to the modus operandi of 2020s chatbots. That is, students were being trained to write like chatbots decades before the chatbots were ever invented. As Pirsig’s near-contemporary Paulo Freire also wrote in 1968’s “Pedogogy of the Oppressed,” this style of instruction tends “to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (Friere 74); that is, Freire also saw back how all of these formulaic, impersonal approaches to instruction only trains students to behave like “automatons,” and thus ultimately become replaceable by automatons. Pirsig’s novel, then, can provide insight into how to teach writing in a much more humanistic and student-centered manner–which per Freire, is how we should have been teaching them all along.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
CHATBOTS, AI, PIRSIG, ZEN, FREIRE, COMPOSITION
