AI Won’t Destroy Education. Just the Opposite.
At least, I hope so.
AI critics often misunderstand how AI will transform education. Do not misunderstand me. I believe some universities are producing students who have not learned but have finished a degree using AI shortcuts.
As Ronald Purser puts it: “Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes.” I have no rose-coloured glasses when it comes to this question. AI in education will make degrees as we know them less meaningful (not quite meaningless).
But is this any real change? In 2020, did we think university education was on the up and up? Were students improving, growing in the humane arts, and becoming the kind of people that traditional universities aimed to produce?
Not in most cases. Five years ago, we assumed that universities pressed students into programs for the greatest utility. When we asked the student, “What are you going to university for?”, the only answer was to get this or that job.
And I want people to get the skills to survive the marketplace, even to thrive in it. But this utilitarian end is not the full purpose of education. As C. S. Lewis explains in his Abolition of Man, education aims to form in the heart an ordered love for what is good, true, and beautiful; and a just dislike for what is evil.
At its heart, education is for leisure—not watching Netflix, but pursuing the questions and ends of life: how should we live? How should a country order its public life? What is true? Read Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture to see what I mean.
If it is not obvious at this point, my argument is that AI will not make education fail; it already has. Not because universities have churned out degrees (although we might ask what the point of this is) and not because they equipped students with skills for the workforce (this is good), but because we misunderstood the nature of education.
Let a trade school be a trade school. Close the degree mills. Restore education to its ancient purposes. Granted, schools may remain one legal organization; I am not ignorant of modern structures. But we can at least be honest about what is happening in education.
Learn nursing to become a nurse. Yes. Get a business degree to get a job. Maybe. Does this mean using AI prompts to write papers that professors will grade using AI prompts, so that you can get a certificate proving you can be another brick in the wall? That’s not what we should want anymore.
Derek Schuurman argues “that the advances in AI will expose the limited value of a strictly utilitarian education. It turns out that many technical and practical skills are the most likely to be displaced by AI.”
And that displacement seems likely.
So then what will we think of the education-for-jobs pipeline? I am not sure. We will still have education for some jobs. I cannot see another way. But will the notion that one must get a four-year degree to find a good job remain? I doubt it. And from that, we might, with Schuurman, wonder if “We could be standing on the threshold of a renaissance that recovers what education ought to be: the formation of a person.”
Christian universities have begun to see the opportunity. “Most Christian colleges,” Schuurman notes, “are ahead of the game when it comes to character formation.” If not most, then at least some are.
So perhaps Schuurman is right when he concludes: “Call me naïve and idealistic, but my hope is that Christian universities and colleges are poised to be on the cusp of a renaissance, offering a timeless and distinct education in an age of AI-driven uncertainty. Let’s continue to foster a life-giving faith-based education—and let’s get the word out!”
Will I go as far as him today? No.
But will I hope as he does? Yes.
Why?
Because I am not an AI doomer. AI will be everywhere, I agree. Yet it will not destroy all things. It will transform them. It will break the current system, I assume. And it might force us back into another paradigm, one in which education serves those who seek it, while skill-based education applies to those who need training for specific jobs.
Would this be so bad? Could it be worse than the degree mills and AI slop that pass for university and college education today? Doubtful. I could give examples of ongoing education that does not fit the contemporary mould but accomplishes its purposes—Davenant Hall, for one.
Or consider the YouTube channel of Jared Henderson along with his group-reading initiatives. These offside efforts educate people outside the norms. Better, in some cases.
And further, I believe this creates space for traditional institutions of higher learning to adapt and get ahead of the coming changes. Christian education could refocus on education, on men with chests, to use C. S. Lewis’s language. It could form a culture in which educators teach people what is true, good, and beautiful. We might, with David in Psalm 27, yearn to see God in his beauty and inquire after him.
And when this happens, we might say, “Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty” (Isa 33:17). For that is the end of education: to know what is good because it is beautiful, and thus be drawn to it. And what alone is good and makes all things “very good” except God himself? So education, intended or not, directs us back to God.
You’re in my head, Wyatt.
Great piece once again. I strongly agree that AI is primarily exposing a system that was already broken, certainly in my own experience. We effectively already had a Kafkaesque credentialing machine that most people thought was inhuman. The defining experience for millions upon millions of students has been the impersonal 300-seat lecture hall where you are lucky to have maybe one conversation with a lecturer throughout your degree. That model is arguably more alienating than a machine that at least (phenomologicaly) responds to you personally.
My hope is that AI might actually help with some of this. For the first time in history, a student reading Aquinas or tackling a complex physics problem set can have a patient, personal tutor. It's not human, but it's a form of interactive dialogue 99.999% of people never had access to before. My, perhaps overly optimistic hope, is that it could help re-humanize learning at scale.
Two other thoughts to extend your point:
- Job Displacement Fear: We often get this wrong. When spreadsheets first arrived people thought it was game over for accountants. Just as what actually happened I think AI will likely just inflate work expectations (probably both in degrees and professional work). We will just catch up there in a few years.
- The Physical World: The AI transformation isn't just a digital change. You can already see a big push for general-purpose robots, the 'physical world' skills we might see as 'safe' will be transformed too. I think this makes your core argument even stronger! If both knowledge work and physical trades are likely to be radically changed in the coming decades, building an entire education system as a 'job pipeline' is almost comically futile.