The Essay Isn't Dying — It's Evolving
AI didn't kill the essay. It exposed that many essays were never really about thinking in the first place.
A colleague told me last week that "the essay is dead because of AI." I disagree — but I understand why it feels that way.
What AI exposed is that a lot of what we called "essay writing" was actually information assembly: find sources, organize them, write an introduction, state a thesis, present evidence, conclude. AI does that in seconds.
But the essay as a thinking tool — where a student works through an idea they haven't fully formed, wrestles with contradictions, and arrives somewhere they didn't expect — that's alive and well. AI can't do that for you. It doesn't have the internal contradiction.
The shift isn't to abandon essays. It's to stop assigning the kind that were always information assembly in disguise and start assigning the kind that require genuine intellectual struggle.
The Assignment Design System gives you a way to design exactly those assignments.
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Chris Meehan
Academic Technology Director at Berkshire School, researching AI in grades 9-12 at Brown University. I publish practical frameworks, tools, and articles for secondary-school educators navigating AI.