A College Instructor’s Biggest Challenge Is Closing the Abstraction Resistance Gap

Abstraction Resistance Gap
noun

There is a widening cultural mismatch between the need for abstract intellectual capacities—critical thinking, judgment, conceptual flexibility—and a population trained to expect concrete, instant, screen-mediated results. The abstraction resistance gap opens when societies raised on prompts and outputs lose the ability to value thought that cannot be immediately displayed, optimized, or monetized. Ideas that require time, silence, and struggle arrive speaking a language the audience no longer understands. Teaching fails not because the ideas are wrong, but because they require translation into a cognitive dialect that has gone extinct.

If you are a college writing instructor facing students who spent four years of high school outsourcing their homework to AI, you are standing on the front lines of this gap. Your task is not merely to assign essays. It is to supply a framework for critical thinking, a vocabulary for understanding that framework, and—hardest of all—a reason to choose it over frictionless delegation. You are asking students to resist the gravitational pull of machines and to decline the comfortable role of Non Player Character.

Your enemy is not ignorance. It is time. No one becomes a critical thinker overnight. It takes years of sustained reading and what Cal Newport calls deep work: long stretches of attention without dopamine rewards. When you pause long enough to consider the difficulty of this task—and the odds stacked against it—it can drain the optimism from even the most committed instructor. You are not teaching a skill. You are trying to resurrect a way of thinking in a culture that has already moved on.