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> I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator". [...] Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.

By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!

After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.

I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.

I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.

Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!

We definitely should allow that for MBA students, since that will most closely mirror what they'll be doing once they get into the work force.

You take these classes in order to internalize the intuition for the subject. That's the point of the class. Getting the right answers is only important insofar as it serves that goal.

Your attitude makes sense in engineering but not in a math class for example.

They're building a different (entirely more concrete) suite of intuition than mathematicians, but engineers need to internalize their intuition too!

From my experience:

We were not permitted to use a TI-89 in math courses since we were expected to learn the underlying concepts, which is much more than learning how to use a tool.

The reasoning was similar in physics. The instructors couldn't care less whether we used the CAS functionality of the TI-89 because that wasn't a part of their curriculum, but they were concerned about students downloading solver programs. (Most of the instructors would agree that creating our own programs to solve problems would be a valuable learning tool, but they had no way to determine whether we created those programs or someone else.)

Academic courses tend to be biased towards laying the foundations so that we can build upon our own knowledge. There are other types of courses that are purely concerned about applications and the use of tools.

> There's objectively no value with learning how to perform calculations by hand that CAS's can perform better automatically.

You're not learning how to perform calculations in most calculus courses. Perhaps not even most algebra courses.

A given expression can be simplified/factored in multiple ways. That TI-89 is going to do it only one way. When working with a typical physics/engineering problem, the way you decide to arrange the terms can help tremendously in understanding the physics of the situation.

I hear this take only from people who've not gone ahead and done advanced (graduate) level work.

What about work for learnings sake?

Frankly, I'm quite glad to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head -- having to pick up a calculator every time I need to multiply two numbers would burn through far more time over the course of my life than what I spent in Kindergarten (or whenever) learning to do it myself.

All you want is for people to be better slaves for your capitalist machine. Never learning how to do things themselves: only consuming, buying what could otherwise have been achieved by the simple (but non-GDP-increasing) exercise of their own mind. Your rhetoric betrays your own class.

The idea of work abolitionism / being anti-work is somehow turned into an accusation of wanting to enslave folks for capitalist ends.

You can't even imagine a reality any different than "Capitalist Realism"

Go read Mark Fischer.

Try reading more than one leftist book: Fischer is great, but he doesn't try to talk praxis. So I'm talking about pragmatics here: just pretending that "we can abolish work by automating it" is pure ideology, totally ignorant of the centuries of historical examples to the contrary. Any time you get back will immediately be seized. What matters are your personal capabilities, what the working class is capable of doing with their own hands. You advocate waiting on the bourgeoisie to hand over control (what, out of good will?), but Fischer could tell you that only by seizing power for themselves can the working class ever become free.

> Any time you get back will immediately be seized.

I imagine some guy several thousand years ago: "Once we finish teaching this animal to pull the plough for us, descendants of The Tribe Between The Two Rivers shall have lives of pure leisure!"