A South Korean city is importing a U.S. liberal-arts model to counter the downsides of AI in classrooms and a high-pressure test culture. Chuncheon has partnered with St. John’s College to introduce the Great Books program—seminar-based, discussion-driven courses that eschew lectures and internet searches—in a bid to rebuild students’ reading and reasoning skills after post-Covid declines shown in PISA scores. The approach arrives as 51% of South Korean students report using AI chatbots weekly, raising concerns that overreliance is eroding both memorization and independent judgment. Early adoption includes 120 college students, about 770 younger pupils, and 40 teachers in training, with backers arguing the method strengthens civic literacy as well; high-school seminars have linked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to current domestic debates over law and democracy. City officials and educators say the initiative is a small but meaningful challenge to entrenched cram-school practices and a hedge against AI’s growing classroom footprint.
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