Do we need to Teach Writing Today?

Do We Need to Teach Writing Today?

Why? What? How?

Uncaged. Unstoppable. Irrevocable.

Pandora’s box is open and the AI genie is out. Algorithms churn. Generative monsters break their chains, and AI—breathless, insatiable—floods every corner. There’s no coaxing it back in, no matter how fervently we debate existentialist fears, tout benefits, or scrutinize flaws. For educators, especially for language teachers, the ground shifts beneath our feet! Certainty wobbles… Nostalgia collides with dazzling, sometimes disorienting, newness. The questions take on strange new shapes: “Will humans even need to write a decade from now? Will phonics survive the algorithmic onslaught? Will writing soon join mental long division in the dusty attic of essential skills?”

Pause.

This is not just about teaching. This is about staying awake. About asking: In the age of AI, what is the true heart of learning? Where is the soul of childhood?

Questions sharpen. Old certainties flutter away and future rushes in like monsoon rain. At its heart—raw, unscripted, unresolved—is the creative child, holding a pen / just fumbling nimble fingers, staring at a blank sheet of paper / the blinking cursor, daring the world to answer.

Yuval Noah Harari calls this our "Post-Truth era.” In it, what matters is not only information, but also meaning and wisdom. More heart and soul than ever are needed in this game of learning—more, not less, precisely because machines can now counterfeit the surface of meaning so well. If algorithms become poets, who will teach children to listen for the music in their own minds? To hear the brushstroke of a memory, the pulse of a half-dreamed hope?

What happens when even our hearts and souls, not just our minds, but our very consciousness, can be algorithmically replicated? Some questions may simply remain unanswered.

Silence settles like dust in digital classrooms where children conjure essays from thin air. We are witnessing the birth of a peculiar paradox—a generation that can summon Shakespeare-worthy sonnets with whispered commands yet struggles to silence the storms within their own hearts. The machines have learned to mimic our melodies, but who will teach the children to hear their own?

Writing is catharsis. All art is. If algorithms take over this haven of hope, what will happen to human mental health? The crisis is already upon us!

My teacher-heart brims with questions: But where is the struggle that teaches resilience? Where is the fumbling that fosters humility? Where is the discovery that comes only through the messy, magnificent act of finding your own voice?

Today, ten-year-old Arjun raises his hand with that familiar smirk: "Ma'am, why do we need to learn 'i before e except after c' when I can just use spell-check?” His logic is devastatingly sound and terrifyingly hollow. These children aren't just challenging spelling rules—they're questioning the fundamental premise of human learning itself, creating a cognitive dissonance that reverberates through every classroom where teachers still believe in the transformative power of the written word.

Some science-geeks, the fear-rationalists argue, we are potentially surrendering the neural pathways that make us human. But to me, much more than neural architecture, the question is about something ineffably precious—the relationship between thought and expression, between struggle and understanding, between confusion and clarity.

Time to take a nostalgic deep dive.

It’s 1984. The actual year 1984, not the George Orwellian 1984, though there are ramifications of it perhaps felt today, more than ever before.

Ripe yellow mangoes toddle their way across the river to us. It’s a sunny summer morning in the foothills of the Himalayas. Immersed in its muddy waters, colder than ice, my cousins and I feel the river’s warm embrace - its fierce, gentle, serene love. In the middle of childhood’s frenzy, a solemn adult voice proclaims, "today, you can write about mangoes. How about their journey from bud to breakfast?" We roll our eyes in synchronized rebellion. Who writes about fruits when there’s water to splash? Bicycles to ride? Trees to climb? Adventures to chase? Our minds scream for movement. We ignore all else. Utterly un-Shelly-like, with no fear of before and after, no pining for what is not, with our sincerest laughter and sweetest songs, that do not tell of saddest thought, we are instinctively mindful.

The solemn proclamation belongs to another part of the day. Summer months mean unbridled effervescence in our joint family home. Mornings at the river, flanked by nights on the terrace, where we lay under the moon, with no time to count the stars, as we swim into dreams, listening to grandma’s stories and our elder cousin’s scary ghost tales. The summer afternoons belong to writing, to the adherence of solemn proclamations, to fuzzy ideas, and often simply no ideas at all by mothers, aunts, uncles and ourselves... For a few minutes each afternoon, our hands are shackled to stillness. Forced to describe the seemingly ordinary even as the extraordinary beckons from every corner. We must write. “Just write”, my mother’s exasperated voice commands flustered by a volley of curious questions. There are just two iron-clad rules she has. Rule 1: Write for at least 15 to 20 minutes every day. She makes us do it and we do. It isn’t a choice. But something shifts in those grudging fifteen minutes of scribbling. My cousin Megha discovers that the mango has "dreamed green dreams before blushing golden." Seven-year-old Kiran decides the mango is "a brave soldier jumping to save us from hunger." My mother just smiles and nods, as we narrate the portions to each other. Comparing fruits to warriors seems the most natural thing to do.

My mother had found her unique strategies. She wasn’t teaching us to write. I think she was teaching us to see. To question. To see beneath the surface, to unfurl layers of meaning. She let our imagination run wild. She encouraged us to go beyond the obvious. To share and elaborate, though that wasn’t a compulsion. She was teaching us to pause, to notice, to wonder. There were no pre-determined moulds, no structures / formats to fit into. Our writing was free, just as our reading was. These slow, patient practices feel almost revolutionary in today’s age of instant-gratification.

Here is the second iron rule: We must read for at least an hour every day. It didn’t matter what we read. It didn’t matter how many pages we read, at which speed we read. If we didn’t comprehend something, she asked us to read it over and again. ‘Read it seven times, and you will get it’, she would say. We simply had to read, read and re-read. Yes, we did get it. We asked each other, consulted dictionaries, connected the dots and figured it out. We were learning at our own pace, in our own way. Amidst the rigid structure of her two iron rules, we had been made the owners of our learning.

The river—ah, the river was my first and finest teacher. She wound her silver way through the town. A liquid serpent. Sometimes gentle as a grandmother's lullaby. Sometimes fierce as a tiger's roar. I would sit on her muddy banks with my little notebook. Initially sulking. Eventually surrendering to her spell. She became my confidante when friends disappointed. My mirror when I needed to see myself clearly. My therapist when the world felt too heavy for a child's shoulders. In those pre-digital days (even pre-therapy days for most of us in India, we had never heard of it), the river listened without judgment. She just received my words. Held my secrets without betrayal. The river was my regular master class in moods—sometimes giggling like silver bells, sometimes growling like distant thunder. She never corrected my grammar. Never questioned my metaphors. Just listened while I tried to catch her essence in clumsy, innocent, honest sentences. The mountains and the sea joined this community of my mentors soon after, and they are to this day.

Today's children could ask AI to describe that same river in perfect prose. But would they then push further, asking themselves: What does this river remind me of, that only I would know?

"Feel the bark before you write about the tree," my uncle would say. My elder sister, the one with those ghost stories, always had some crazy ideas and constraints. "Tell me about the ant's adventure in fifty words,” she would say. “Make me feel the butterfly's loneliness in three sentences." Looking back today I realise, she was teaching us the art of distillation. Creativity blooms brightest when constrained. Meaning multiplies when words are few. Those afternoons of free writing, of finding our flow, somehow contained entire universes. The raindrop's last thought before joining the river! What shadows whispered to each other at noon. The secret romance between the wind and leaves. Call it nature-journaling or what you will. To me, it felt like prayer.

All that was over four decades ago.

Today, amidst generative AI and the algorithms, if I were that little girl, wouldn’t I simply summon an article about the mangoes to cheat my mother’s daily writing assignment? Would I take the time to ‘stand and stare’ (Leisure, Davies)? Would I know ‘the bliss of solitude’ (Daffodils, Wordsworth)? Would I even get to know the river and feel its warm embrace? Perhaps, that’s a tad romantic, but we do need the wallowing of romance, don’t we? The mindful romantics perhaps matter more than ever before. Poetry can be our repose, our pause, the sweet sanctity of silence in all the deluge of noise that surrounds us today when phones are but extensions of our brains.

Ten-year-old Aditi raises her hand with that familiar mixture of curiosity and challenge. "Why should I struggle to describe this sunset when my phone's AI can write a better poem in three seconds?" Her question pierces the heart of our educational moment. She's asking whether human creativity has any value when algorithms can outperform us in tasks we once considered uniquely human. But she's also unknowingly echoing John Holt's fundamental question: Why should children submit to adult-imposed learning when they can direct their own educational journey?

So, instead of sighing in defeat, I lean forward with excitement. "Show me that AI poem, Aditi. Now tell me—what does this sunset remind you of, that the AI could never know? What would change if you wrote about your sunset, not just any sunset?"

Here's the thrilling plot twist: AI isn't creativity's replacement—it's creativity's new dance partner. Yes, AI can craft technically superior verse about sunsets, complete with perfect metaphors and flawless rhythm. Yet, can it know that this specific sunset reminds Aditi of her grandmother's saffron sari? Can it capture how the orange bleeding into pink makes her think about the time she spilled paint during art class and discovered that accidents sometimes birth beauty? The machine processes data about sunsets. Only Aditi can process her own special unique sunset, filtered through her unique lens of wonder, her irreplaceable human experience. Only she can reach her mini-c, her own little-c, pro and perhaps big-C levels of creativity, through her own voice (Refer Kaufman’s 4 C model of Creativity). This is where creativity research offers hope in an algorithmic age. Today, more than ever, we need to make time for those small, personally meaningful creative moments—they develop the flexible thinking skills that even advanced AI cannot yet replicate. The free writing assignments my mother perhaps unknowingly pioneered, weren't just writing exercises. They were creativity boot camps, building cognitive muscles that could bend, stretch, and leap in ways no algorithm can predict. What if, instead of competing with AI, we learned to choreograph with it?

Notice, how often I use ‘yet’ and ‘more than ever’. It’s intentional.

The Wren and Martin years taught me something profound about creative constraint and technological freedom. That stern red grammar book wasn't creativity's enemy—it was creativity's demanding dance partner. Learning rules gave me the foundation to break them beautifully. What if AI becomes our new grammar book? Teaching us patterns and possibilities, then watching us shatter them in spectacular, human ways?

I imagine future classrooms where children begin stories with AI brainstorming sessions, then take those ideas into territories no algorithm could predict. Where they use artificial intelligence to generate research quickly, then spend their precious classroom time on the deeper work of connection, interpretation, and emotional truth-telling.

Enter the magnificent possibility of AI as creativity amplifier rather than creativity assassin. When machines handle the mechanical drudgery—spell-checking, citation formatting, basic research—children can focus on asking questions no one has asked, making connections no algorithm can predict, finding meaning in chaos through the uniquely human process of creative sense-making.

But here's the uncomfortable truth we educators must face: our education system has been complicit in creating the very humans-as-algorithms problem we now fear. The mindless focus of correct answers, standardized formats, and predictable outcomes—has been training children to think like machines long before machines could think. Classrooms have often been akin to controlled timelines, narrow rubrics, extrinsic rewards, and fear of failure. We've been creating the algorithmic humans that AI now threatens to replace. Our classrooms thus need to transform into learning environments, school corridors into independent maker-spaces, labs into tinkering arenas, assessments into reflective practice, with subjects unboxed into trans-disciplinary inquisitions.

My students are already pioneering this hybrid future. Eight-year-old Anahita asks generative AI for "five words about a goldfish." The AI offers: golden, graceful, swimming, circular, peaceful. Anahita takes these ordinary words on her own unique journey of creative transformation: "My goldfish swims golden circles around my sadness, gracefully teaching me that peaceful doesn't mean still." The AI provides raw material, a vocabulary scaffold. Anahita builds the emotional architecture, the thought, adds metaphor and personal truth that transforms information into art. That let’s art be cathartic, as meant to be. Together, they create something neither may have achieved alone. This is co-creation, not replacement.

Isn’t all creation, all innovation, built upon something? Isn’t all creation, in a sense, co-creation? A car, for example, builds upon a wheel, a battery, a fuel engine and the many sub-parts that come together to create a new whole - a four-wheeled car, a co-creation inheriting creations from the past and co-creating afresh for the future.

My students are already discovering this creative collaboration. A thoughtful teenager, Priya uses AI to overcome writer's block: "Give me three opening sentences about friendship." Then she discards all three and writes something completely different—but the creative momentum has begun. Anxious Arjun asks AI to check his spellings so he can focus entirely on getting his ideas down without fear. The AI becomes their creative confidence coach, handling the technical worries while they handle the human wonder.

But here's the crucial question: How do we teach children to be wise creative collaborators rather than passive creative consumers? The answer lies in understanding what makes human creativity irreplaceable. Our emotions. Our experiences. Our inescapably romantic selves that have an innate ability to find meaning in chaos. Our capacity to connect seemingly unrelated ideas in ways that surprise even ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against the believers in logic and reason. Design thinking offers a potential answer, as a new educational compass. In lessons adapted to the design cycle—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—children learn to approach problems as inventors rather than answer-regurgitators. When Anamika uses AI to research homelessness statistics, then designs a flash fiction story from a stray dog's perspective, she's not cheating—she's learning to be human in ways machines cannot replicate.

Balance remains crucial. The slow wisdom—writing with pens on paper, nature journaling, unguided observation—cannot be rushed or optimized away. These practices cultivate attention, patience, and deep focus that have become more valuable, not less, in our hyperconnected world. When children alternate between AI-assisted brainstorming and unplugged reflection, they experience the full spectrum of creative thinking. Yes, the unplugging and putting pen to paper is necessary.

Harari's dataism warns us that humans might become mere data-processing nodes in algorithmic systems. But creativity—authentic, messy, personally meaningful creativity—resists dataification. When children create from their own experiences, filtered through their own perspectives, they assert their irreplaceable humanity against algorithmic reduction. They declare: I am not a data point. I am a meaning-maker. In the famous words of William Edgar, after all, “We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams… we are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems.”

The river that taught me to write still flows in all its glorious majesty. Today's children might collaborate with AI to describe her moods, her colours, her sounds. But the magic happens when they push beyond algorithmic suggestions into territories only they can explore. The wise ones will then sit quietly by her banks, listening for the whispers, discovering the metaphors only they can make, asking questions only human hearts can ask: What does this river remember? What dreams do waters dream? How does it feel to flow like her?

The biggest question for us as educators is: Are we creative enough to teach creativity? I think we are, if only we are brave enough to abandon the educational methods that created potentially algorithmic humans in the first place. Industrial Revolution lost their need long since. The question is if we can truly begin to see children as natural learners, a species with an ‘absorbent mind’ born to learn, as Maria Montessori elucidated? Are we willing to transform our ways, to let them evolve? Are we willing to make way for the new? The new that must navigate a complex baffling algorithmic future.

Evolution doesn’t need permissions, though. Young learners in our classrooms are already living this hybrid reality. They use AI for quick research, then spend hours crafting personally meaningful responses. They collaborate with machines for efficiency, then retreat to handwritten journals for depth. They're not choosing between human creativity and artificial intelligence—they're learning to dance with it. We are the ones taking time to adapt.

Twenty years from now, the most valuable humans will be those who learned to think thoughts AI cannot think. Who can feel feelings AI cannot feel. Who can make connections between heart and mind that no algorithm can predict. These will be children whose educators were creative enough to teach creativity—not as a subject, but as a way of being fully human in an increasingly artificial world.

Mangoes will still ripen on trees whose roots reach deep into ancient soil while their branches stretch toward tomorrow's sky. Nature has a different selection process. Nature doesn't choose between old growth and new fruit—it honours both, drawing from timeless sources to nourish contemporary abundance.

The question isn't whether we need to teach writing in the age of AI. The question is whether we're creative enough to help children discover that their authentic voices matter more than ever—not despite artificial intelligence, but even more so because of it. Future children won't ask why they need to write when AI can write for them. They'll ask how they can write with AI in ways that make both human creativity and artificial intelligence more magnificent?

In a world of AI content and polarising social media echo chambers, the human heart that can generate irreplaceable meaning becomes infinitely precious. Let’s take this creative challenge head on!

Bibliography (some key references):

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper, 2016.

Holt, John. Escape from Childhood. Da Capo Press, 1974.

Kaufman, James C., and Beghetto, Ronald A. "Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity." Review of General Psychology, 2009.

Amabile, Teresa M. "How to Kill Creativity." Harvard Business Review, 1998.

Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Scholarly overview. ScienceDirect, 2009.

Microsoft. "2025 AI in Education: A Microsoft Special Report." 2025.

IDEO Stanford d.school. "Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit." 2024.

Research on AI’s impact on writing and creativity. Cengage Group, Brookings Institution, EdWeek articles (2025).

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Selected Poems. Including "To a Skylark" and other lyric works reflecting on nature, creativity, and imagination.

Microsoft Education. 2025 AI in Education: A Microsoft Special Report. 2025.

IDEO Stanford d.school. Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit. 2024.

Cengage Group. "AI's Impact on Education in 2025." June 2025.

Brookings Institution. "AI Has Rendered Traditional Writing Skills Obsolete; Education Needs to Adapt." May 2025.

Edgar, William. "Music Makers." The Music Makers and Other Poems. 1874.