He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...
I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.
Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.
I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.
Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.
In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
54% of adults lack proficiency in literacy
Public schools have failed to “educate”
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
COMMENTARY: In an era when AI can write anything, authentic education must go beyond the mere production of words.
“The end then of Learning,” wrote John Milton in 1644, “is to repair the ruines of our first Parents.” The image is hard to improve: education as repair, as recovery, as the restoration of capacities diminished by sin and neglect.
Four centuries later, in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), that image has become urgent again — because we are now surrounded by a technology that offers to perform, on demand, much of what we had long assumed education required us to do ourselves.
I came across Milton’s passage by chance while browsing a collection of the English writer’s works and opening it to his 1644 tract Of Education. Milton was not writing about algorithms. Yet he saw with unusual clarity the educational error that AI now magnifies: the confusion of language with learning.
Language, he wrote, is “but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.” He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
No technology in recent memory has so enlarged the instrument. Large language models such as ChatGPT can summarize books, draft essays, organize research notes, translate passages, generate code, and imitate the prose that schools and universities have long taken as evidence of education.
Used with discipline, they can be genuinely useful. A professor may use them to prepare discussion questions. A researcher may use them to survey literature more quickly. An administrator may use them to accelerate routine writing. It would be foolish to deny their utility.
But utility is not the same as education, and AI magnifies an older weakness. It tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty — it is substitution.
For Catholic education, that substitution matters because learning is not the production of acceptable performances but the formation of a person capable of truth, judgment and responsibility.
Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
Generative AI industrializes exactly that pedagogical mistake. It supplies finished language before the student has undergone the reading, questioning, hesitation and revision that make language meaningful. What Milton regarded as a mistake of sequence, AI turns into a system.
This matters because education is not built from answers alone. Every answer worth teaching was once a response to a question someone genuinely asked.
Students do not assimilate knowledge merely by receiving conclusions — they must be brought into the question. That is why the principal agent of education is the student. No one can learn in another’s place. A tool may assist instruction; it cannot do the learning for the student.
The teacher’s role accordingly becomes more important in the age of AI, not less. A real teacher is not merely a distributor of content. A real teacher is an experienced guide in inquiry: someone who knows what the student has not yet seen, what distinctions must be made, what confusion needs exposing, and what question should come next. The best classroom is not a transfer of information from one container to another. It is a living act of thought. That is why seminar, disputation, laboratory, tutorial and serious conversation retain their force even when information itself becomes cheap.
We tend to celebrate knowledge: facts accumulated, results confirmed, information stored. But as the biologist Stuart Firestein has argued, discovery begins not only with what we know but with a disciplined sense of what we do not yet understand. That frontier is where large language models reach their limit. They can reorganize the archive with astonishing fluency, but they cannot inhabit uncertainty, pose a genuinely new question, or take responsibility for truth.
This clarifies why certain acts cannot be delegated to machines without ceasing to occur at all. Attending carefully to a text, weighing conflicting evidence, judging whether a conclusion is warranted, taking responsibility for what one claims — these are not ancillary tasks. They are the work by which a mind is formed.
No machine can perform them in our place — not because machines lack processing power, but because these acts have no effect unless a person performs them. Their purpose is not to produce an output. It is to form the one who does them.
Education worthy of the name has always understood this. Its end is not the delivery of content, however accurate. It is the formation of persons capable of judgment, attention and intellectual honesty. That formation requires a genuine encounter with difficulty — the friction of a hard text, the resistance of a problem that does not yield quickly, the discomfort of revising what one believed. It requires embodiment as much as intellect: reading slowly, speaking in one’s own voice, accepting the cost of standing behind one’s words. A person does not become capable of truth by managing information alone. Wisdom is formed in contact with reality, not in its simulation.
The deepest challenge of AI in education is therefore not academic integrity, though that problem is real. It is whether we will allow our schools and universities to define learning as the production of acceptable outputs. If that is our standard, outsourcing will always look like efficiency. But if education is the formation of judgment, substitution becomes self-defeating.
What should institutions do? The answer is neither panic nor blanket prohibition. It is pedagogical redesign. More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information. More laboratory and studio work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not.
When students use AI, one reasonable requirement is transparency: disclose what was asked, what the system produced, what was kept, what was rejected, and why. The point is not surveillance. It is intellectual ownership — the habit of standing behind one’s own thinking. Institutions should also reinvest in the teacher-scholar whose presence, judgment and intellectual seriousness cannot be automated.
The same commitment belongs at home. A dinner table free of devices, conversation across generations, reading aloud together, and the habit of asking children not only what they think but why — these are small schools of freedom. They teach that education is not the production of impressive sentences. It is the formation of honest minds.
The moment we are living through is, in this light, less a crisis than a clarification. AI has not created new educational problems; it has made old ones impossible to ignore. The habit of rewarding performance over understanding, fluency over depth, and polish over genuine engagement was already present in our institutions before the first language model was trained. AI simply industrializes and accelerates those habits until their emptiness becomes undeniable.
That may be its most unexpected gift. If this disruption forces us to recover what education was always for — the formation of minds capable of real questions, careful judgment, and responsibility for truth — then the age of AI may prove, paradoxically, to be an age of educational renewal.
Milton’s deeper claim presses further. The end of learning is not merely competence or civic virtue, but to “know God aright, to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him.” Education, in that view, participates in the restoration of what sin has obscured.
No machine will ever repair those ruins. That restoration is finally God’s work before it is ours; yet, aided by grace, we must still undertake the human labor of attention, judgment and love.
Santiago Schnell is provost and professor of mathematics at Dartmouth, with adjunct appointments in biochemistry and cell biology, and biomedical data science at the Geisel School of Medicine. A mathematical biologist by training, he also writes on the Catholic intellectual tradition, the philosophy of science, and the mission of Catholic higher education.