> free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable)
That's something that sounds good on paper, but it's incredibly difficult in practice. For one, students are all over the place in ability, so what's critical thinking for one student may be the most boring of intuition for another. Evaluating students based on their critical thinking is ripe for subjectivity. I've had multiple teachers who were great at teaching, but clearly had favorites and that was very discouraging for students that were on their bad side and received arbitrarily bad grades. The English teachers I most appreciated followed a boring rubric that incentivizes more formulaic writing.
Also, regurgitating content is an important skill as well. Half the formal writing I do at work is documentation, which strictly falls into this category. The other half is design docs, which arguably is a form of regurgitation as well. I'd come up with the design anyways, and the doc is just to share it to others.
That's something that sounds good on paper, but it's incredibly difficult in practice. For one, students are all over the place in ability, so what's critical thinking for one student may be the most boring of intuition for another. Evaluating students based on their critical thinking is ripe for subjectivity. I've had multiple teachers who were great at teaching, but clearly had favorites and that was very discouraging for students that were on their bad side and received arbitrarily bad grades. The English teachers I most appreciated followed a boring rubric that incentivizes more formulaic writing.
Also, regurgitating content is an important skill as well. Half the formal writing I do at work is documentation, which strictly falls into this category. The other half is design docs, which arguably is a form of regurgitation as well. I'd come up with the design anyways, and the doc is just to share it to others.