Like some of you, I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed with avid interest. Who wouldn’t want to read a text that found a way to encourage revolution and change, to bring justice to those who had long dealt in squalor and poverty? Today, I realize it was a bit like a privileged boy reading about sword and sorcery, pretending at striking a blow for freedom while reading a story. What flowers would spring from these seeds at this time, as we deal with Gen AI being pushed into schools by the Government?

Enthrallment

That’s why I found myself enthralled by Jane Tompkins’ chapter, Pedagogy of the Distressed, in the book that Richard L. Graves edited, Writing, Teaching, Learning: A Sourcebook. You can read it yourself here.

Tompkins begins with the quote that piqued my interest:

“Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind.” – J. Krishnamurti

What a powerful quote, no? What fears do you have that prevent the flowering of your mind? The older I get, the list I make in retrospect grows longer and longer. Let’s see:

• Shedding long-held comfortable beliefs
• Losing contact with those who think I think or believe a certain way
• An inability to find a way forward that brings joy and happiness, at least, as well or better than the long-held beliefs or ways of thinking

I love what Tompkins writes about Friere and education today, but allow me to share the quote that she starts her chapter off with.

Note: My comments are late. In 1999, I had other concerns, like teaching people how to use the internet. I had moved from teaching writing to teaching digital tool use to people who had no idea how to use a mouse pointer, word processors, or create webquests. I suspect I had better remained teaching writing and language since that fighting remains vibrant, while technology is now ubiquitous. Surely, I could have made teaching writing as successful as my other endeavor <joke>. Read these responses to Tompkins later.

Banking as a System of Education

According to Freire, education can be thought of as a banking. He says:

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing…Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits while the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s not too far off from the system of education many of still deal with today. Jane Tompkins suggests that this system is not prevalent in the United States, instead, there is more of a performance system. But you could argue that point. Before I make another connection, I have to share Jane’s perspective, which I took to heart immediately.

Total Somnambulism

Now that is a word I don’t run into often. I often joke that my lectures are cures for insomnia, but somnambulism is not a word I use. Jane Tompkins writes:

One cannot be a total somnambulist and still survive…but a lot of people have come pretty close….Teaching and learning are not preparation for anything are the thing itself.”

When I reflect on her words, I am reminded that it wasn’t until my fifties that I took a harder look at what I’d been taught as a child. History. Religion. Belief systems. Values. You start to pull the cord on one, and the rest come up, all stuck together. I felt that I must have been sleepwalking, engaged in somnambulism, throughout my life. I suppose that the awakening had to happen, that moment when you pass from sleep, sleep paralysis to being fully awake. . .then realizing you are still asleep and in the process of awakening, again and again.

A New Method

This awakening pushed Tompkins to teach using a new method. She abdicated the throne of thought (my words), and instead, brought the depositories up to teach instead. Er, the students. She followed these steps:

• Teacher makes up the syllabus
• Students sign up for two topics that interest them, and they work with whomever else has signed up for the topic (anywhere from 2-4 students per group)
• Groups meet with teacher outside of class to discuss their ideas and strategies of presentation
• Teachers provides lots of feedback in written form, but no grades

Tompkins observes that while students may not do so well as the teacher in their leading a class, they are at least developing their skills, and finding a voice. She emphasizes that “learners forge a connection between the content in the class” and their own lives as “individual students.” She offers some suggestions such as:

• Trust the students
• Talk to the class about the class
• Less is more
• Offer what you have
• Don’t be afraid to try new things
• Let go

Her “Aha!” moment about learners making personal connections reminds me of Geoff Petty’s Evidence-Based Teaching.

Reproduction vs Reasoning Tasks

In that excellent text, Petty points out that:

Learning is an active process of making sense that creates a personal interpretation of what has been learned, rather than a perfect representation of what was taught. It involves not just creating a perfect representation of facts and ideas, but thinking then in a way that relates ideas to other ideas and to prior learning, and so creates meaning and understanding.

Petty goes on to describe the process of what happens when we engage in reasoning tasks rather than reproduction tasks. He defines those two concepts in this way:

• Reasoning tasks: Tasks that help in meaning making.
  • These tasks require the learner to process, apply, and link what they have learned with existing learning and experience.
  • They require understanding and deep learning (consider the parts, respond creatively, give a judgment).
  • Questions like “Why is it like this?,” “But what would happen if…?,” “How could that be used in practice?” are considered to support challenging reasoning tasks.
• Reproduction tasks: These are tasks that are simple, do not require learners to create a meaning in mentalese (the brain’s simple language that does not require words) and to connect it to their existing learning.
  • These tasks involve students to repeat back knowledge or skills that have been directly taught by the teacher or directly explained in resources.
  • Students are called upon to state or recall what has been presented, state an explanation given, and do that after being shown something

Petty describes the process in this way:

We do not passively record what we hear but interpret it in unique ways, make meaning for it, and encode it in our brains.

What Jane Tompkins calls upon educators to do is to set up situations that have “learners forge a connection between the content in class and the lives of individual students.”

The Gen AI Way

Forging a connection between content and your life. One way to make those connections goes back to Petty writes, a process that involves the student in “making sense that creates a personal interpretation of what has been learned.” What happens when Gen AI tools are interposed in this process?

My own efforts at making sense of content and forging a personal connection center around paper and pen, of revisiting content days, weeks, and months after first writing it down. It involves putting it in blog entries, presentations, speaking to others about it. For those concepts that are generated probabilistically by chatbots, I find my ability to remember them less certain. I’ve reported this before, which is why I take the long, slow road of paper notes in meetings and jotted ideas. I won’t forget the quote Jane Tompkins shared at the top of her chapter by J. Krishnamurti (a name I could scarcely spell by memory upon first sight).

But how will Gen AI interfere with students ability to forge a connection with content? Jane’s assertion that Freire’s point about banking as a concept for education is in question.

Gen AI as Mediator of Knowledge and History

As students begin to increasingly learn to use Gen AI, the technology takes the place of knowledge-giver and historian. With the current administration’s penchant for removing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) (“Say their name” has new meaning as concepts of equity, diversity and inclusion face excision from the historical record, forgotten by future generations), we must ask,

“Will students do the research when Gen AI tells them what to think and how in ways that trouble the oppressors, that is, the providers of Gen AI, who seek to domesticate the masses?”

That is why critical thinking remains so essential, why websites like ThinkingIsPower.com, Critikid, and others are so important.

Will critical thinking thrive in schools that encourage reproductive tasks, push a particular ideological perspective above all others? It would be nice to imagine that they would, but ain’t nobody perfect. Only time and experimentation will tell.

A New Paradigm

While not mentioned in Tompkins’ chapter, the 1999 book her chapter appears in suggests that a new paradigm for teaching writing was coming into effect. The paradigm, as described below, should be well-established in today’s schools. I played my own part as a writing teacher, but I watched as it disappeared in the schools with the advent of technology tools and interim high-stakes assessments.

Let’s turn the paradigm into a checklist. You conduct an assessment in YOUR school, and tell me, “Have we arrived at the new shores of writing instruction?”

• Instruction focuses on the writing process with teachers interacting with students’ writing during the process
• Teachers assist students in generating content, and discovering their WHY, their purpose
• Audience, purpose, and occasion are important factors in assignment of writing tasks
• The resulting product is assessed by how well it meets the writer’s intention and meets the audience’s needs
• Writing is seen as recursive (not linear) process with overlapping activities of prewriting, writing, and revision
• Writing is a way of learning, as well as a way to communicate
• Expressive and expository writing modes are considered
• Writing teachers should be people who write

I can certainly attest that my writing workshop focused on these aspects, but…this is the very form of writing abolished in favor of whatever is now done in classrooms. And, as a result, Gen AI takeover of schools, where the AI corpus of knowledge, will dominate students and teachers focused on simply creating products that meet the standards, absent intention, a real audience, a need to communicate, or a way to learn.

Alternatives to a Dire Future

What alternatives do we have to this dire future? Jane Tompkins’ approach raises its head from 1999 book, a text cast in the throwaway pile long ago and discarded. What other solutions might one find in the discards pile?

Plucked from Irrelevance into Immortality

For fun, I posed a question to Gemini 2.5 Pro (via BoodleBox):

Explain the contents of Jane Tompkins essay, “Pedagogy of the Distressed” and apply it to our situation today, with allegations of Gen AI chatbots interfering with students’ writing and critical thinking

Here’s is the response…while it is much better than mine, at least, mine is mine. I am going to study the response more, though. Do you think it’s accurate?

Of course. Here is an explanation of Jane Tompkins’ essay “Pedagogy of the Distressed” and its application to the current concerns surrounding Generative AI in education.

Jane Tompkins’ “Pedagogy of the Distressed”

Jane Tompkins’ influential 1990 essay, “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” is a sharp critique of what she calls the “performance model” of education. This is the traditional model where the teacher is the expert authority figure who dispenses knowledge, and students are the passive vessels who receive it, memorize it, and then perform their understanding on exams and papers to earn a grade.

Key Arguments:

1. Critique of the Performance Model: Tompkins argues this model is fundamentally based on fear. Students are afraid of being wrong, of looking stupid, of getting a bad grade, and of failing. Teachers are also afraid—of not knowing the answer, of losing control of the classroom, and of being seen as incompetent by students and colleagues.
2. The “Distress”: This constant state of fear and anxiety is the “distress” of her title. It creates an environment that is emotionally and intellectually stifling. It alienates students from the material, from their own learning process, and from each other (since they are in competition for grades). Learning becomes a chore focused on external validation (the grade) rather than internal curiosity and growth.
3. Focus on Product over Process: The performance model is obsessed with the final product—the A-paper, the perfect exam score. It largely ignores the messy, non-linear, and often frustrating process of learning, which is where Tompkins believes true intellectual development happens.
4. Proposed Alternative: She advocates for a student-centered pedagogy where the classroom becomes a community of learners. In this model, the teacher acts more as a facilitator or coach. The focus shifts from delivering content to exploring it together. Emotion, personal experience, and the process of intellectual struggle are not just tolerated but valued as essential parts of learning. The goal is to replace the pedagogy of fear and performance with one based on curiosity, collaboration, and genuine engagement.

Application to Generative AI in Education Today

Tompkins’ critique from over 30 years ago is remarkably relevant to the current debate about AI’s role in student writing and critical thinking. Her framework helps explain why students might misuse AI and how we might reframe the problem.

1. AI as a Tool for the Performance Model: The “performance model” that Tompkins critiques creates the perfect conditions for the misuse of AI. When a student’s primary goal is to produce a polished essay that meets a professor’s requirements for a good grade, an AI chatbot is the most efficient tool imaginable. It can generate a grammatically correct, well-structured paper in seconds, allowing the student to successfully “perform” competence without engaging in the underlying learning process. The AI becomes a shortcut to the desired product, bypassing the process entirely.
2. AI as a Response to “Distress”: The anxiety, pressure to succeed, and overwhelming workload that Tompkins identified as “distress” can drive students to use AI as a coping mechanism. Faced with multiple deadlines and the fear of failure, a student might turn to a chatbot not out of laziness, but out of desperation. In this view, AI isn’t the cause of the problem, but a symptom of the underlying distress inherent in the educational system she describes.
3. Interference with Critical Thinking: Tompkins argues that real learning happens in the struggle—the drafting, the dead ends, the revisions, and the “aha!” moments. AI’s ability to produce a finished product on demand directly interferes with this essential struggle. It robs students of the opportunity to develop their own voice, organize their own thoughts, and build arguments from the ground up. It short-circuits the very process that builds critical thinking and writing skills, replacing it with a hollow, machine-generated facsimile.

Applying a Tompkins-inspired pedagogy would mean shifting the focus away from assignments that AI can easily complete. Instead of just grading the final essay, an instructor might assess the process: outlines, multiple drafts with tracked changes, peer review sessions, and in-class reflections on the writing process itself. The goal would be to create assignments where using AI as a simple ghostwriter is impossible, but using it as a brainstorming partner or research assistant could be a valuable part of a transparent and documented learning journey.

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