Why Student Writing Matters

Visitors to my office are intrigued to see a medal on a bright red ribbon in pride of place on my bookshelf. When asked, I explain that when a student wins a national medal in the Scholastic Writing Awards, the school, too, receives an award in recognition of this rare feat: after all, only a fraction of one percent of the hundreds of thousands of entries result in a national medal.

In the past two years, LJCDS students have won dozens of regional Scholastic writing awards (one of which was parlayed into that 2023 national medal, with two others currently in the running for 2024 national medals) and have been recognized by writing competitions via St. Mary’s College, the La Jolla Library, the John Locke Institute, the World History Association and more. We have had students admitted into renowned writing workshops at the University of Iowa and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. During the 2023–2024 school year, more LJCDS students have entered (and won) writing contests than in any other year in memory.

I want to applaud this evidence of the strength of LJCDS’ writing program, encourage students to discuss such opportunities with their teachers or with me, and recognize here the remarkable writing that our students do that is not necessarily celebrated in a public way. LJCDS educators guide young people daily through the demanding, reiterative and recursive process of turning thoughts into words, words back into revised thoughts, and thoughts/words into sentences and paragraphs. The results range from Lower School poems to Middle School “nemesis” narratives to Upper School DBQs (document-based-question essays). 

In these days of anxiety about human authorship in the era of generative artificial intelligence (or “genAI”), it’s worth remembering why and how writing is central to an LJCDS education. After all, what’s the point of all that human work if a bot can write any genre and length on almost any given topic? 

One answer is as profound as it is simple: only a specific human being can write that human being’s ideas and emotions. A bot can use probabilistic algorithms to mimic human ideas and emotions in general. It cannot enter the mind or experiences of any one human being in one time and place.

Consider, for example, a genre of writing that stands as a capstone to all that an LJCDS grad-to-be has learned about the writing process: the college application essay.

Our students create nearly a thousand of these every year, and if the results weren’t often deeply personal, it would be tempting to plaster the school’s walls with printouts of them. LJCDS college app essays are funny, heartbreaking, courageous, honest, inquisitive, and optimistic—sometimes all at once. Each app-essay writer has to use years of practice in structure, clarity, tone and style to distill vital life experiences into a mere few hundred words.

Can genAI compose a college app essay? Yes. Can it compose the specific college app essay that recounts how sweet the air smelled during a life-altering experience in middle school, or one that connects a 17-year-old’s current emotions to feelings born in a lab classroom on a cloudy afternoon a year earlier, or one that recreates the dialogue between parent and child on a long-ago morning of gentle wind and birdsong? No. And it certainly cannot pair the telling of such stories with the act of stepping outside of them and explaining how they fit into the larger arc of a life as it has been lived to date and into the writer’s ambitions, goals and dreams for the future.

That’s what human writing can do. I invite you to find an opportunity to read some of the hard-earned work of our young writers—whether it has been composed inside or outside the classroom—and to congratulate the human being who did the work on a job well done.