Maybe one should teach Hierocles after all!
Why obscure texts might be best for teaching in an AI world.
When I posted something earlier about Hierocles, my initial thought was, “Now here’s a text that will never be assigned in a class, and probably shouldn’t be. It’s just too short and focused to be of much use in a class.” Since, then, I’ve changed my mind already.
A big problem educators face when teaching widely-read texts is that students today have such fast and easy access to papers written them. Actually, that’s how it was two years ago. Now, since so many papers, articles, and books have gone into “educating” Artificial Intelligence, getting an A-worthy paper can be done in seconds. This is even true of Heirocles, an author that few scholars studying the ancient world would be able to say anything about.
Here is 1-page summary I asked Claude.AI to write for me. It took about 10 seconds:
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