Classical Education & AI

Classical educators can expect to find themselves on the front lines in the various crises generated by AI. In the process, they may discover themselves facing not merely an onslaught but a tremendous opportunity.

Consider the skills-crisis. Even as public schools are surrendering to chatbots by dropping the requirement that students learn to write well, classical schools will likely use this crisis as an opportunity to raise standards and recover lost skills – for example, by going back to having students write by hand in class and for assignments.

The predicament generated by the widespread deficit in information literacy, and the associated epistemological crisis, is also likely to highlight the necessity for the type of education offered by classical educators, especially the role applied critical thinking can play in making sense of the confusing information landscape.

The informational and philosophical challenges of AI also present an enormous opportunity since these challenges bring to the forefront philosophical questions that, for many students, may have previously seemed remote. The mind-body problem, the epistemic virtues, the meaning of being human, the nature of consciousness, the difference between computation and knowledge, all rush to the forefront and become extremely pressing in the age of AI.

Similarly, classic literature that may previously have seemed remote— Ovid’s description of the Pygmalion myth, Plato’s Republic and Sophist, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Huxley’s Brave New World, Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology—may have a fresh relevance. Indeed, in discussions of AI and its adjacent controversies (transhumanism, techno-humanism, singularity theory, the simulation hypothesis, etc.), teachers have a tremendous opportunity for engaging students with the Great Books and the Great Ideas.

For this type of engagement to be fully effective, it must be driven at the level of administration. Administrators may want to proactively encourage interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty to develop curricular frameworks that integrate the practical and theoretical aspects of information technology into different subjects. For example, if a senior thesis coordinator is providing instruction on exercising information literacy when using ChatGPT, he could draw connections to what students learned in philosophy class while studying Aristotle’s account of intellectual virtues; this, in turn, could be integrated into discussions of wisdom when the Bible class studies Proverbs, which could then be linked to what students studied in history about changing attitudes toward information following the rise of the printing press.

Ultimately, however, for these types of discussions to be meaningful, they must be situated in the context of our theological commitments, and the spiritual resources offered by our classical Christian heritage.

In the climate of uncertainty, it is tempting to either follow figures like Sam Altman in looking to AI as a path toward utopia, or to take a neo-Luddite position of complete disavowal, perhaps even dismissing the entire project as satanic. Resources from our classical Christian heritage offer a prudent way of navigating these extremes.

Christian thinkers have long taught that prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues, involves collecting information prior to making a decision. Sometimes information-collecting comes from a human source (e.g. wise counsel or a book), sometimes it comes from a natural source (e.g. evidence of past high watermarks on a river bank), and sometimes it also comes from an electronic source (e.g. a calculator or spreadsheet). There is no reason, in principle, why AI might not fall into the latter category by offering an additional source to inform wise decision-making.

Beyond the question of prudence, however, AI needs to be situated within the context of Christ’s redemptive work. At the heart of Christian theology is the doctrine that, through Christ, the Creator God is progressively renewing the world and eliminating the reign of death. While the church fights against death through evangelism and discipleship, the church also acts as an agent of renewal through supporting technology and inventions that help advance, in partial and incomplete ways, Christ’s victory over death. For example, St. John Chrysostom’s pastoral theology put a high premium on self-care, while he advocated various medicinal remedies to help with ailments. Other missionary saints have worked as doctors and set up hospitals. Christians today can continue in this tradition by embracing the potential new technologies have for good. For example, if artificial general intelligence (AGI) could prevent a bridge from collapsing or help find a cure for cancer, Christians of all people can rejoice to see the effects of the curse reversed in small and incomplete ways. Believers can be at the forefront of these advances by pointing toward a humane use of AI, and working to situate innovation within a context that accepts, rather than disrupts, the value of limits and the givenness of creational order.

Additionally, the church plays a prophetic role in warning against dehumanizing uses of AI. Yet more than merely offering critique against this or that wrong use of AI, our theology gives us resources for addressing the broader structural shifts that emerge when our interaction with the world, and each other, comes to be mediated through algorithms. How is AI changing our understanding of ourselves and those around us? How do we preserve our humanity in a world where information is valued more than communion, process more than substance, efficiency more than flourishing, the tree of knowledge over the tree of life? The church has the philosophical resources to address these questions with wisdom and irenicism, and it has the prophetic mandate to do so.

But even more than simply addressing these pressing issues of our time, Christians must be able to show—through our liturgy, our sacraments, our communities, and our way of life—what it means to renew the human in a technological age. Our classical schools and homeschools are poised to be at the forefront of this renewal, as they are positioned to say to a world starved of transcendence, “Come and see.”