Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels at 300: Satire's Warning on AI in Education

Dónal Gill, a political science professor at Dawson College and Concordia University in Montreal, reflects on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which turns 300 this year, and its relevance to generative AI in education. Gill, originally from Cork City, Ireland, notes that Swift's third voyage to Laputa and the Academy of Lagado satirizes speculative learning and a device that lets the ignorant write books without genius or study—a precursor to large language models. He describes his own classroom challenges: students day trading cryptocurrency, including one who made $8,000 on $MELANIA Coin during a lecture on Quebec sovereignty, and the difficulty of detecting AI-generated work. In response, he banned phones and laptops, moved to chalk-and-talk, and instituted in-class exams. He cites a Brookings Institution report warning that AI risks outweigh benefits in education, and notes that AI boosterism at commencement speeches was booed. Gill argues that education should cultivate self-cultivation and productive friction, not cognitive offloading, and calls for classrooms to be citadels against distraction. The article was published in The Dial on September 8, 2026.