Back to Education’s Future

Is it possible that an old form of education is more necessary than ever, precisely because we are now in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) that would seem to render such schooling obsolete? Classical education gave birth to the Western Civilization and the democracies that have provided the greatest potential for freedom and progress in human flourishing. As AI takes a more prominent role in how we see and understand the world, and in how we express answers to questions regarding not just trivial matters but first principles—such as truth, goodness and beauty—that govern and empower human society, how do the classical liberal arts remain not just relevant but essential to human flourishing?

Historically, the rigorous intellectual nature of a classical education would seem ideal in a knowledge economy, such as ours. A student trained as a master of knowledge, which includes retention analysis and information communication, possesses capacities that would seem to set one apart in such an economy. However, with generative AI, it’s a fair question to ask whether the human intellect will retain its value. If AI can solve calculus problems, compose essays, write poetry, identify valid logic or a fallacy, and write eloquent speeches, why train students? Why engage humans for these tasks at all?

AI Challenge

These kinds of questions began well before the buzz about AI. The internet alone caused the average American to ask, “Why do we need schools if we can have all the information we will ever need at our fingertips? Why memorize anything or learn how to do anything that the internet can do for us?”

AI is simply the next leap in the same trajectory. The decline in intellectual rigor within most American classrooms and the skepticism regarding the value of a classical liberal arts education in the first place have been decades in the making. As well, the questions most educators are asking about AI have more to do with academic integrity than anything else. Throughout public and much of private schooling, we discarded traditional education in wisdom and virtue for education in economic utility in the early 20^th century. However, perhaps the ubiquity of generative AI might provide the needed moment for educators to revisit fundamental questions that have been neglected in favor of simply seeking the most efficient ways to get information and skills for the 21^st century.

The AI moment is generating ample conversation about curriculum and pedagogy, but most of it centers around management of symptoms rather than the root issues of education and the formation of humans who can thrive in an AI atmosphere. A Google search for strategies and learning standards for students in the age of generative AI reveals that the primary discourse focuses upon academic integrity and character education to help students use AI ethically. AI is lamented as a new way for students to cheat or to bypass research, critical thinking, original writing, and reading and interacting with complex (or even simple) texts. Educators are both looking for ways to implement safeguards against plagiarism and to simultaneously help their students to use AI to create efficiencies and perhaps to even elevate their own original work. They focus largely on dealing with AI within the existing models of progressive education, which has as its end the equipping of students with pragmatic skills and knowledge needed for the workforce or for a higher education, which is also aimed at economic utility in the job market.

In contrast, classical liberal arts educators, who have as their aim human flourishing through a holistic approach that cultivates wisdom and virtue through the liberal arts, show significantly less interest in combating AI’s potential for academic and intellectual harm and even less interest in its promise to increase students’ critical thinking by taking care of more basic generative tasks, purportedly leaving students freer to do creative work and higher order problem solving.

Is this because the classical school is unconcerned with academic integrity or with critical thinking? By no means. By its very nature, classical education is already tailored for this AI moment. With its focus on cultivating wisdom and virtue, logic, and rhetoric through school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy, classical education graduates young people who can wisely and ethically write the algorithms that run generative AI and, more commonly, can use AI as discerning moral and intellectual agents, bringing to AI what only flourishing humans can: moral and intellectual agency.

Classical Education

Classical education is often caricatured as having an antiquated and decidedly white-male fixation on learning Latin and reading the Great Books. However, while Latin is indeed studied in most schools that bear the classical title, and while the classical curriculum certainly includes its fair share of old, time-tested texts written largely by white men, its primary distinctive feature is its telos.

Classical education aims for the cultivation of wisdom and virtue in its students by nourishing their souls on truth, goodness and beauty. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, a wise and virtuous citizenry was essential to any form of democracy, and, accordingly, education was primarily mimesis—the imitation of exemplars. Classical education, then, takes a child from his or her natural tendency to foolishness, vice and childish egocentrism to wisdom, virtue and the stewardship of something larger than self.

By contrast, progressive education assumes that the inherent wisdom and goodness of each child need only be given avenues for development and expression through experiences and self-expression, facilitated by a teacher who no longer instructs but accompanies the child on a self-centered journey of becoming his or her true self.

The purpose of classical education, then, is to cultivate human excellence, while the purpose of 21^st Century progressive education is to bring about self-actualization. This excellence is not quantified by one’s material well-being, self-actualization nor one’s acclimation to society, but in one’s relationship to the true, the good and the beautiful. Through Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Augustine and the medieval scholastics, these first principles became synonymous with what the Greeks called Prime Reality and what the Judeo-Christian tradition found in God. Goodness corresponds to morality, truth to rationality and beauty to aesthetics. These are the powers that give being and meaning to everything else. A society may be better or worse than the one that preceded it or another adjacent to it, but transcendent realities are unchanging and provide a better measure of excellence and flourishing than how juvenile humans feel about their world and their place in it.

In addition to striving for objective models of human excellence, the classical educator believes that enhancements in technology, knowledge and vocational skills alone are not indicators of flourishing. Intuitively, even the progressive educator tends to agree with this assertion. While each successive human generation starts life advanced in technology compared to the previous generation and realizes the comforts, efficiencies and perceived security associated with that technology before it is even conscious of it, no generation of newborns has a moral, aesthetic or rational head start on the previous ones. In fact, we might review human history and call an earlier generation nobler, more beautiful and more rational than a later one, despite the quantitative growth in knowledge and technology with each new generation. This is because the measure of human greatness is tied to first principles.

Job training and workforce preparation are crucial functions of education, but they are not the primary goals. Nor is there any conflict between with the classical approach. On the contrary, students will be far better prepared for the workforce, regardless of occupation, if he or she has been formed by school that instill a depth of knowledge of our traditions, intellectual history, grounded in Christian virtue and theology.

Back to the Future

Most humans intuitively recognize the validity of first principles and commit themselves in some way to their importance. Even the materialist or moral relativist believes in objective moral realities—the good. C.S. Lewis says of our purported moral relativity, “If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face that we are breaking it and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.”[i]We believe in transcendent truth and rationality

so much that even when we make postmodern claims to the contrary, we do so citing science and statistics. We feel the need, even when claiming relativity, to anchor that relativity in evidence for its rational merits. For millennia now, humans have also behaved as if there are objective realities concerning beauty. Objectively beautiful creatures, landscapes, ideas, and human creations are virtually universally appreciated as such.

The great books, great ideas, and great art and architecture of every civilization—those which have stood the test of time and continue to speak, even if less ubiquitous than in previous ages—powerfully integrate truth, goodness and beauty, and convey them with such clarity and poignancy that centuries of Western liberal arts education have studied, admired and experienced them with humility, seeking to be shaped by them and to imitate them, believing that mimesis of exemplars is the best way to become excellent humans. Each new generation needs to look to those people, literary characters, ideas and works of art that have shaped desires, imaginations, conscience and rationality in congruence with the transcendent.

So classical education insists upon providing each generation with a shared collection of exemplars from human history, and in the West, from Western Civilization in particular, so that its students may strive together in pursuit of ideals that, through trial by fire, have proven to produce free, wise, virtuous souls. Classical education’s conviction is that such people are adaptable to technological and social changes in any age.

Future Workforce & Present Reality

Pragmatically speaking, we do not know today what skills and specialized knowledge will be necessary for careers in 2040. Dismantling our classical liberal arts curriculum and pedagogy that served to preserve progressive growth in freedom and liberty in the West and even globally through massive cultural and technological change for centuries, is a 150-year-old experiment. Historically speaking, progressive education is in its infancy, and the rapid growth of classical schools over the last 30 years is due in large part to the conclusion by many that the experiment has failed. Proponents of classical education point to a century of decline in American academic competitiveness in math and literacy, the ubiquitous anecdotes of college professors receiving ill-equipped and morally ambiguous freshmen from progressive K-12 schools, physical and social violence in schools, and the epidemic of mental illness in school-age children. 

These concerning symptoms are seen by classical educators as the result of a disembodied human experience. We argue that humans become truly wise and virtuous through experiences with what we might call “the real.” The physical world and other humans in close and intimate proximity. Real actions in real space with real matter creating real consequences. Our physiology by design or evolutionary genesis—whichever you prefer—is made for experiencing the world with all of our senses.

Classically, we are embodied souls. The interplay between our biology and whatever essence we call our true self, is essential, intimate and powerfully formative. Reality mediated through screens makes us less human, under-stimulating us and making us passive sensors using only a fraction of our intellect, emotion and physical powers. In this screen-mediated reality, our bodies and minds live in fewer dimensions and atrophy in ways that we do not yet fully understand but which we are beginning to experience in the intellectual, moral, physical and psychological decline of the population. The classically-minded person would propose that our increasingly virtual lives and the growing ubiquity of AI is making and will make us a different kind of human—likely a lesser one. In fact, numerous studies indicate the IQ levels among students in Western countries, including the U.S., have fallen in recent decades.

Life Laboratories

I’ve not encountered scores of classical educators who boycott AI. They aren’t seeking to destroy all the bots. What classical educators in a progressive- and AI-saturated world seek to do is to create life laboratories for unplugged living. They are delivering school days unplugged from AI, social media and search engine algorithms and plugged in to relationships with the real—classmates, teachers, books, people from far off places in history and miles but whom time has tested and shown them to have timeless qualities.

As popular culture is fixated on upstart ideas and technologies, hurtled through space and time into the future, drinking in each new technological convenience with abandon, the classical school calls a timeout each day to look back and to ask the philosophers, poets, historians, scientists and other great thinkers and doers to sit with them and discuss the enduring questions of life that inform a wise and ethical use of AI and a host of other “advancements.”

For those of us who are willing to play nicely with AI, the goal is to become so fully human through time-tested cultivation of body, mind and soul through the classical liberal arts tradition, that we can use AI with circumspection and discretion, maintaining our connection with the real, being formed by the created world the way that the Creator or evolution “intended,” and utilizing AI within the boundaries of its inhuman essence. We seek to give each student a deeps sense of what it is to be human and to shape his or her affections with long days spent wrestling unaided by algorithms with real ideas, real people, real matter, in real problems that cannot be solved by AI, either because the AI simply isn’t there yet or because the screens are unplugged.

Trivium & Quadrivium

In practical terms, what happens to a student in the scope of a classical education? The classical student goes through two basic stages of learning. The first is a mastery of the tools of learning (the Trivium), which many recognize from Dorothy Sayers’s essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,”[ii] from which many contemporary classical educators seek inspiration for founding classical schools. The Trivium includes grammar, logic and rhetoric.

In the second stage, the Quadrivium, which includes math, science and music, the student uses the skills and tools he has mastered to join the Great Conversation that used to take place on university campuses, and in pubs, churches and the public square. The Great Books are works that have captured the richest contributions to this great dialogue about virtues, such as courage and justice and temperance and the meaning and purpose of human life. Another way of speaking of this second phase is simply “studying the sciences.” 

To be educated in any discipline, the student must: (1) know its basic facts (grammar); (2) be able to reason clearly about it (logic); and (3) communicate its ideas and apply it effectively (rhetoric). The trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric is fundamentally a collection of language arts, which the classical education movement believes are being tragically neglected and undervalued through generative AI, which takes students directly to the answers of nearly all questions one might ask, and drafts essays based upon a student-entered prompt, putting the student’s mind into sleep mode.

In contrast, the classical commitment to the liberal arts effectively nourishes and develops the mind to be a prudent master and selective user of AI as an inferior complement to the human intellect, which remains superior even as AI achieves computational supremacy. Like the math teacher who does not allow the students to use a calculator prior to becoming excellent at mental calculations with pencil and paper, before allowing use of AI, the classical educator seeks to form in students the capacity to reason aloud with peers through complex texts and questions that AI is ready and willing to answer for them.

The human mind, body and soul are capable of far more than any bot currently being “taught” to replace the student’s intellect and moral compass. But if the student is not formed and perfected through the hard work of acquiring the tools of learning, working out the logic proofs, and engaging in critical reading, listening and debate with complex human souls and minds, it may simply subsist in a subhuman manner under the comfortable but inhuman reign of AI and be prone to manipulation by those who write the algorithms.

Taming AI

Educators who see AI primarily as a threat to academic integrity are missing the proverbial forest. AI is not primarily a threat to academic integrity. Classical education sees AI as an existential threat to human flourishing as it holds the potential to create debilitating intellectual, social and moral atrophy and apathy, which might render humanity increasingly less distinguishable from the technology it ironically created.

By classically educating our students, the promise of AI is greater as it will be programmed and leveraged by those with the uniquely human capacity to remain its master. A classical liberal arts education was and remains necessary for a society to remain free from despots and human vice. Now it takes on the role of preserving our human nature being diminished by an increasingly passive and disembodied lifestyle that grows more entrenched as AI “improves.” AI makes classical education more necessary than ever. ◉

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[i] Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012.

[ii]https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf