Education and AI

Education is seemingly at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence technology is making waves in the job market, in macroeconomics, in coding, and in schooling. A political commentator recently summarized the current situation this way: “Now with AI there really is no way for a mass assembly line style system to prevent kids from using ChatGPT to do everything for them… Public education was already dying. AI just killed what was left of it. It’s done… The public education experiment failed, and now it’s over.” This is a black-pilled (read: pessimistic) perspective from someone already biased against public ed, but it seems reasonable. Is education really facing anything new in the face of AI? We don’t think so, at least not in principle. Education has always been a process of encountering information and working to integrate it with previous knowledge to produce wisdom, understanding, and/or skill. Shortcuts have always existed, but they don’t undermine education rightly sought after; shortcuts always undercut the learner. A liberal arts education provides the sort of humanizing experience needed by taking the long way around through critical thinking and the Great Conversation. 

Consider two scenarios: in the first, a young student realizes all of the answers are in the back of the book and uses them to speed through his work; and in the second, several older students decide to share all of their answers on all of their homework. These are both shortcuts in the system of education that focuses on grades and assessments—and they completely miss the primary principles of education. Education is about the work.

 Sweat equity is what makes education daunting, but it’s also what makes victory all the more rewarding. The act of learning is important because the process is what takes data and binds it to the learner. Cheaply won answers are quickly lost. The struggle of figuring out how new information fits inside already existing mental schemas makes it sticky—this is doubly true for information that is entirely new, because it requires entirely new mental infrastructure. As the struggle to understand continues, the lifeless data starts to grow and connect itself to the other information the student has. It takes on a life of its own inside its host as it adds to a sprawling web of knowledge as students revisit the information and apply it to new, unrelated fields or as disparate data points are conjoined to make a pointed argument. 

Ideas are like fine-cut diamonds. They’re only fully appreciated when they are examined from every angle under a very bright light. This critical thinking process is the basis of education. There have always been ways to outsource this work to get the right answers. Millennials remember the dawn of Wikipedia well and all of the warnings that came with it. Gibbs gives similar warnings to educators: “If Wikipedia could ace your exams, you are not teaching human beings but machines.” As students move into Logic and Rhetoric Schools, their assignments rely less and less on answers that are right and wrong, where answers are found in the back of the book, and more about counterfactuals, relationships, and consequences. Students are exposed to information and challenged to build mental scaffolding using it. This system allows for the classroom to be less about lectures and more about sharing insight, understanding, and mistakes. The independent integration process becomes a shared communal experience. Solo work becomes a group benefit. This type of work takes the long way around and gives students the faculties to deal with problems. 

If critical thinking is about creating the infrastructure of learning, then the content is about training taste. There are foods that are good for the body that many don’t seem to like, and there are foods terrible for the body that have everyone enchanted. The same goes for stories; they are soul food, after all. We want to feed our students a menu that humanizes them.

The imagination feasts on story, and it is the educator’s job to feed children their meat, potatoes, and vegetables. One of the hardest transitions into a classical framework is the resorting and reranking of what is good, true, and beautiful. Many of our peers would just be happy that a child has chosen to read anything instead of turning to a screen, but we must hold a more strict line: what is read must be good fodder for the soul.

Parents and educators have to be informed about what is objectively lovely and what is suitable for their children at a given time. Classical education helps by introducing students to enduring works that fall into four categories: lyric, comic, epic, and tragic. These are the narrative parts of the Great Conversation, the dialogue through each century where each generation of humanity learns from their forebearers and picks up where they left off. These genres give students patterns and examples for how natural laws govern emotion and affection, hope in suffering, worthwhile adventures, and fear unto judgment. Literature and history through these frameworks act as humanizing discipleship by proxy. 

Lyric literature like the Psalms show students how to express emotion, gratitude, grandeur, and natural affections. Comic literature reminds learners to look forward unto the ideal end, with marriages and feasts; they teach how to have hope. Epics show students that life can be bigger than it is. Actions have consequences, and they can make life sublime. Tragedies call students to examine themselves and consider the ways of the fallen—heed their warnings. Shortcutting these experiences leaves students one-dimensional.

Education as education will endure through AI. The lineage of classical education shows that it has staying power, from Plato and Solomon to the enduring question,  “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Critical thinking and the Great Conversation will continue to mold students into citizens of humanity. We as parents and educators must partake in the Conversation ourselves and invite our students and children to love what thousands of years of joy, struggle, breakthrough, wisdom, faith, and writing have set on their doorstep.