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Humanities education this year seems to be different. The elite New York City schools have adjusted their curricula to account for the newfound ease of cheating on papers, and the result has been more in-school assessments in history and English and fewer take-home papers.

This, in turn, changes how humanities tutors work with their students. While close and careful reading of core texts is still vital, in-class assessments require a different skill set than papers. In previous years, students would draft an essay, and tutors would help them make that paper better. We would address grammatical and syntactical errata, while also thinking carefully through the argument a student was making. The student would then (ideally) meet with their professor and get critiques before redrafting. The process was akin to creating a sculpture: meticulous work towards a product they could (ideally) be proud of. The preparation for in-class assessments is more like a sports practice. Instead of focusing on the final product, tutors have to help with technique and speed, so that, come game day, a student will have sharper reflexes.

The good news is this obviates some of the immediate time pressure before exams: if your reflexes are strong, studying becomes less necessary. The bad news is that strengthening those reflexes is time consuming; it requires regular practice. Humanities tutoring is now akin to training for the SAT or ACT.

Predicting what this means for the future remains outside both my own skill set and the bounds of mortal wisdom. But the most concrete benchmark we have for an education’s success remains the career opportunities that education generates. Schools are, I imagine, doing their best to predict the future and adjusting their curricula accordingly. I see two probable ways the humanities fit into that future.

In the first—the future that in-person essays suggest—written communication is wholly outsourced to AI systems. The humanities become a way of training oracy: the ability to think and speak extemporaneously. The rapid in-class writing assignments serve as a stand-in for a student’s ability to think under pressure.

But in another future it is easy to imagine a job market that values sustained and careful consideration; an AI can help clarify decision-making but someone still needs to make a decision. In this case, reading carefully and then crafting an idea—the process of writing—serves as ways to teach focus itself: a particularly valuable skill when AI systems seem likely to offer further distractions in a cultural milieu that already feels like dogs at a squirrel convention.

The danger of the present tack that New York schools are taking is that—by avoiding the take-home papers that require sustained effort—the schools may ultimately be undermining students’ focus on, well, focus.

Fortunately, in either of these possible futures—and in many others besides—humanities education remains valuable in itself: not just for skill sets and career prospects, but because the humanities involve a meditation on the condition of being human—a condition that we continue, at least for the foreseeable future, to be trapped with.