On the Importance of Cultivating a New Lexicon for Education in the Machine Age

If you’re a college student who used AI all through high school, you’ve probably already heard the horror stories. Professors who ban AI outright. They pass out photocopied essays and poems and you have to annotate them with pens and pencils. The only kind of writing you do for a grade is in-class blue books dragged out like museum artifacts. Class participation grades hover over your head like a parole officer. You quietly avoid these instructors. Sitting in their classrooms would feel like being a fish dropped onto dry land.

You grew up with screens. These Boomer professors grew up in a Pre-Screen Universe—a world that shaped their intellect, habits, and philosophy before the internet rewired everything. Now they want to haul you back there, convinced that salvation lies in reenactment. You can smell the desperation. You can also smell the futility. This is a waiting game, and you know how it ends. AI is not going away. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. The genie is not returning to the bottle. You will use AI after graduation because the world you are entering already runs on it. These Pre-Screen Professors will eventually retire, ranting into the void. You don’t have time to wait them out. You’re here to get an education, and you’re not going to turn your back on AI now, not after it helped you make the Dean’s List in high school. 

And yet—here’s the part you can’t ignore—you’re not wrong to be uneasy. You know what happens when AI use goes overboard. When thinking is outsourced wholesale, something essential atrophies. The inner fire dims. Judgment weakens. Agency erodes. Your sense of self vanishes. You become an NPC: responsive but not reflective, efficient but hollow. A form of hell with good grammar and polished syntax but hell nevertheless.

So the problem isn’t whether to use AI. The problem is how to use it without surrendering yourself to it. You need a balance. You need to work effectively with machines while remaining unmistakably human. That requires more than rules or bans. It requires a new language—terms that help you recognize the traps, name the tradeoffs, and choose deliberately rather than drift.

That’s what this lexicon is for. It is not a manifesto against technology or a nostalgic plea to return to chalk and silence. It’s a survival guide for the Machine Age—realistic, unsentimental, and shared by students and instructors alike. On one hand, you must learn how to navigate AI to build a future. On the other, you must learn how not to lose yourself in the process. This lexicon exists to help you do both.