In primary school, we were subjected to the torture of writing essays on our first day back from the holidays. It was torture because the essays were in Afrikaans and I wasn’t a big fan of the subject.. mostly because I sucked at it.
So writing a full one-page opstel (“composition”) was never fun for me. The title was always My Vakansie (“My holiday”), and you had to explain what you did during the break. Because I struggled with the language, the whole thing usually turned into a word salad.
Almost all my essays had the line “Die hond het vir die skape geblaf” (“The dog barked at the sheep”). I don’t know why I loved that line, but to be fair, it was also true.
I spent most of my holidays engrossed in gruelling hard labour from dawn to dusk – working in the garden or looking after livestock – and at some point the dog definitely barked at the sheep. For some strange reason, that line became my go-to.
The same thing happened in English. You’d write a story about your holiday that, if it were a person, would walk with its hands and think with its elbows… just all over the place.
The teacher would hold up your paper, a pained look on her face: ‘The last time I checked, you were having ice cream at home, and now you’re in another village at your grandmother’s place, and suddenly you’re in a mall in East London. How am I supposed to follow this?’
You’d then verbally explain what actually happened, and the teacher would let you rewrite it… to thread the events together in a way that made sense for the reader.
It was annoying being stuck, staring at your essay, trying to figure out what to tweak. You’d rewrite it again and again until the teacher finally approved the flow and gave you a mark.
Those were my early days of learning to enjoy writing (alongside my failed rap career, with my younger brother as my only audience). My English teacher always said, “Writing is the same as thinking. With writing, your thoughts are just seen by another person. Your job is not to confuse them… make it easy for the reader to follow your thoughts.” That grade 4 writing framework is the one I’ve used ever since.
So far, I hope you haven’t been confused. I’ve shared my struggle with writing (background), sprinkled in humour to keep you with me, and explained why I believe writing is the same as thinking (context).
You have followed my story from the first line to this one precisely because of what I learned in grade 4.
I learned to walk side-by-side with a reader, to think with them. And that is the very skill – forged in the frustration of staring at a messy page – that I fear is lost when the thinking is outsourced from the start.
Last month, I came across a video of Po-Shen Loh, a Mathematics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, talking about what it will take to succeed in the AI era. He said the biggest area where students are “cheating” is in their writing. He called this a potential disaster for “civilisation”, because while AI looks for patterns in words, the real work is in the struggle to form them.
When kids delegate that struggle, they skip the process of building logical thought. Loh’s analogy hit home: using AI to write your essay, he said, is like saying, “I’m not gonna run a mile for exercise, I’m gonna drive my car one mile for exercise.”
It reminded me of a conversation with a younger cousin who was in matric two years ago. He told me, “Yonke into ilula ngoku, ufaka i-assignment ku-ChatGPT wenze u-copy and paste.” Which means: everything is easy now. You just put your assignment into ChatGPT and copy and paste. I didn’t know what to say.
I’m not against AI. I see its benefits. But I can’t help asking: what are kids even learning at school now if everything is served up as “easy and convenient,” often at the expense of critical thinking?
Research shows that students who take notes by hand are significantly more likely to succeed than those who type… because writing forces you to engage and make sense of what you’re learning.
Any innovation that removes the necessary toil of thinking through a problem risks making us mentally weaker. It’s why an older generation often excels at mental maths because they built that muscle without a calculator. We’re now replacing the mental marathon with a drive around the block and calling it exercise.
This isn’t a sanctimonious lecture telling young people to enjoy writing like I do – I know how boring the ‘back in our day’ crowd can be. I’m just genuinely concerned about what this will look like 10 or 20 years from now, when people are so dependent on AI that they’ll ask it to write their wedding vows. I can already hear it: “This love letter delves and underscores that it’s not about love, it’s about happiness.” Good grief…
The main reason I still think young people should learn to write is this: you can’t improve your writing without improving your thinking. The better you write, the better you think. End of story.
Writing this piece took me over three hours… chopping and changing, staring at a messy page, and constantly asking myself if I was thinking with you, the reader. I was re-living the same principles instilled in me as a nine-year-old: the messy part is the interesting part. It’s where you find your voice.
I just wish more young people could experience that struggle, even with all the conveniences AI offers, because that struggle is where thinking, learning and influence begin.
© Phumzile