The case for at least some AI-free learning in universities
Rufaro Mafinyani suggests that preventing the use of AI in student assignments in higher education is misguided (“Why universities must embrace AI as a tool, not a threat”, May 8).
He is correct that AI is a powerful tool and that AI literacy is now a requirement for the job market. However, it does not follow that every element of learning should involve AI or that the recall of information from memory is now redundant. This is like telling someone not to bother learning a language because they can use Google Translate.
The point of writing an assignment is not simply to produce it fast but for the students to undergo a transformation through the process. By researching, connecting ideas and articulating a narrative, students internalise the content of their subject.
Education research shows that learning is more effective when students actively generate knowledge than when they passively read. Which has more educational value: spending days puzzling out an assignment or getting AI to generate a draft the student merely reads over before submitting?
AI literacy is not the only capacity students need. The goal is to incorporate AI without short-circuiting broader intellectual development.
Richard Ballard
Via email
ANC’s handling of Ramaphosa’s foreign currency scandal questionable
Peter Bruce is absolutely correct in saying the judicial panel’s Phala Phala report is weak (“Ramaphosa ought to get his day in court”, May 13).
However, the protection given to the president when this happened was a typical ANC cover-up. His story is so implausible, but even if it were true, there is absolutely no way he did not contravene tax or exchange control regulations.
Do me a favour — a Sudanese businessman buying buffalo in foreign currency cash and not collecting his animals? The South African Revenue Service has confirmed that no disclosure was made (for either VAT or income tax), yet somehow the Reserve Bank exonerated him when it is illegal to hold forex above a certain amount for over a month.
Bruce correctly points out that former chief justice Sandile Ncgobo is a Zuma man, as is former State Security Agency head Arthur Fraser, but we all know the cash in the couch was to pay off Ramaphosa’s backers in the ANC.
Blair Hutchings
Via Business Day online
Jewish dissent on Israel contrasted with silence among Muslim communities
Supporters of democracy and free speech will welcome that all over the world there are Jews, like David Lewis, who actively and loudly criticise Israel’s actions (“Jewish identity and dissent in the shadow of war”, May 12).
Indeed, there are many organisations of Jews actively opposed to Israel’s actions. But one must pause when Lewis writes that “the Jewish community is as heterogeneous as the next religion-based community”.
I do not recall having seen one letter or article in your esteemed publication from Muslim correspondents similarly criticising Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis.
Of course, to do so in their own countries would risk imprisonment or death. But even the large Muslim diaspora is, with one or two exceptions, totally silent. There is no comparison between the dissent among Jews and the loud silence of dissent among Muslims.
Lewis is also naïve to write that “ordinary Palestinians … will not countenance the slaughter of millions”. Israel, for all its “genocidal actions”, does not proclaim as a policy of the state the killing of all Palestinians.
Indeed, more than 2-million Palestinian citizens are living voluntarily in Israel. Contrast that with the 1988 Hamas Charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Jews and the state of Israel.
It’s perfectly legitimate for Jews to condemn the actions of the Israeli government, but making false comparisons between the two sides does not help that cause.
Jonathan Schrire
Kenilworth
Allusions to quaint rituals don’t lend more weight to criticism
I wonder why David Lewis, among other attention-seeking not-in-my-name-ers, has to preface his opinion on Israel with an account of his Jewish antecedents and litter it with allusions to quaint Jewish rituals (“Jewish identity and dissent in the shadow of war”, May 12).
Is it because he thinks his being a Jew gives it more weight, as it is intended to do, while what he is actually doing — consciously or otherwise — is telling his leftist associates: “Hey, look at me, I’m a Good Jew, and I’ll prove it by reinforcing your worldview as a Jew”?
Sydney Kaye
Cape Town
Terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ in Middle Eastern discourse are libellous
Unless David Lewis is a graduate of Harvard or Columbia and has been indoctrinated by radical left-wing professors, he should be able to distinguish between a fact and a libel (“Jewish identity and dissent in the shadow of war”, May 12).
He should be capable of reading a dictionary and testing its definitions with what passes for journalism or statements uttered by politicians and NGOs.
Let’s start with “genocide”, a term loosely thrown about when libelling Israel. In 1948 there were 500,000 Muslims (they were not called Palestinians then) in the areas now controlled by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Today there are 2.7-million. By what definition, or historical example, do the victims of a genocide actually grow exponentially?
“Apartheid” is a particularly ugly word. It reminds us of the institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Yet visiting any Israeli city would dispel you of this notion. On the streets and on public transportation you will see people of every colour and hear English, French, Arabic and Hebrew spoken everywhere.
Arabs are proportionally overrepresented in academia. In hospitals you will see Jews and Arabs, male and female doctors, staff and patients. This ethnic and gender mingling exists nowhere else in the Middle East or North Africa.
Jacques Fortier
Montreal, Canada
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