By Josh Pauling, Guest Contributor
In the summer of 2024, Open AI, a leading company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), released its latest version of ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, where the “o” stands for “omni,” meaning all. This “omni-tool” can generate text, audio, and images, speak in a human voice, and perceive and interpret one’s physical surroundings. Similar developments are unfolding with other tech giants. Microsoft has Copilot; Google has Gemini. And all this is just the beginning, as AI is further incorporated into software and devices, even being personalized for each one of us. Some are heralding AI as the next great revolution in education.
But what does all this mean for an education rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty? How does the classical tradition provide a framework to deal with whatever lay on the technological horizon?
The rich heritage of classical education can help us develop a clear philosophy of technology rooted in Christian theology and grounded in the wonder of humanity created in the image of God. And even more, we find pedagogy, practices, and content that fortifies our humanity in the digital age. Robin Phillips and I address the challenges of the digital age for education, home life, the church, society, and more in our new book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. Here is a distillation of some of our thoughts on classical education in the AI Age when it comes to assessment and pedagogy. (In this short piece, I will forego any discussion of classroom management strategies and policies regarding smartphones and digital devices. For more on those topics see here and here.)
Assessment Methods
The issue of AI being used for school assignments is very real. In my class of six high school seniors in the 2023-2024 school year, ChatGPT and AI image generators were almost weekly topics of conversation. Students were experimenting with them.
But what makes this more challenging for the teacher is that cheating is harder to prove. When a student uses language that seems out of place or above their writing level, it used to be as simple as typing that portion of the paper into an internet search engine and finding where the student copied it from. With AI systems, that text is generated specifically for them, and is not “part” of what you can search for online.1 High school teacher Ben Berman laments that these developments have caused students to lose interest in learning to write. “They’ve already tried to convince me that asking ChatGPT to write their college essays for them is no different than using Grammarly to correct their dangling modifiers,” Berman explains, and his conclusion is not optimistic: “high school writing, as we know it, is doomed.”
This means that teachers, administrators, and parents must consider their assessment methods carefully and simultaneously offer the type of formation that makes AI less attractive in the first place. Thankfully, there is a long tradition of humane assessment methods that don’t require internet connected devices, and, even more importantly, provide direct person-to-person interaction and feedback. The old-fashioned oral exam, or what one of my professors called a colloquium, are worth considering and adapting to your setting.2 So too, perhaps, are handwritten essays as part of an assessment in class. And of course, debates, Socratic seminars, speeches, informal questioning, and memory work all play an important role at the appropriate educational level. Furthermore, since these methods are in real-time and not mediated through a digital device, they are in some measure AI-resistant. Thankfully, there are tried and true methods of evaluation that allow teachers and parents to see clearly what their students know without fancy technology or an internet connection.
Pedagogy
At the same time, we must not approach education in a negative way that turns it into an AI “arms race” between teacher and student. The teacher-student relationship must not be consumed by suspicion or antagonism, as there is an element of trust that is necessary for this unique relationship to flourish. Professor and author Alan Jacobs confesses:
I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students. So over the years I have developed a series of eccentric assignments. These days I rarely assign the traditional thesis essay—an assignment I always hated anyway, because it makes both the writing and the grading utterly mechanical—but instead assign dialogues between two literary theorists, or an imaginary correspondence between two novelists, or just an old-fashioned textual explication: Take this passage and explain to me, I ask them, without paraphrase, what it’s doing, what’s going on in it. And those assignments have, as it were, taken us back in time….[because] the online paper mills, after all, don’t have a stack of conversations about The Brothers Karamazov featuring Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. It’s been a very successful strategy…until now.
What Jacobs worries about is developing a “pedagogy of the gaps,” where he can only assess students on things that a chatbot can’t do. But that leads to a diminishing window of potential assignments and forecloses the potential for human formation, resulting in a deformed and depleted education that falls far short of its ultimate aims. As Jacobs puts it, “If I can only pursue a ‘pedagogy of the gaps,’ assignments that happen to coincide with the current limitations of the chatbots, then what has become of me as a teacher, and of my classroom as a place of learning?” Jacobs puts his finger on the deeper question with which we must engage our students: “I could simply make the assignments that I believe best suited to what I want my students to learn, and then turn to them and ask: ‘What are the problems of life that incline so many of you to turn to the chatbots rather than do these assignments?” When these types of penetrating questions that address virtue are combined with humane assessment strategies that reduce temptation to use AI, we end up with a fruitful approach that recognizes students as full persons. And, it employs the traditional two-fold way in which human desires and affections are reordered towards proper ends. First, we need boundaries, including ways to limit those aspects of technology that are dehumanizing and addicting. Secondly, our hearts need to be stirred by a more beautiful vision than what the technocratic world can offer. As we lead students towards higher goods, refining their desires and interests towards the permanent things, perhaps AI will lose some of its attraction.
In Part 2 of this series, I will explore how the content and curriculum of a classical education addresses many of our technological questions.
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1. Granted, there are a growing number of AI-detection tools available like GPTZero, TraceGPT, etc. that help with this.
2. What this professor did was have three students at a time come up to the front of the room and be seated as a panel as they were queried by him on the readings for the week. I also have used this with my high school history students, and have found it useful.
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Josh Pauling served as an elder for fifteen years, and was a high school history teacher and coach. He also is a furniture-maker, a classical educator, and has written for a variety of publications including Classical Lutheran Education Journal, LOGIA, The Lutheran Witness, Modern Reformation, Public Discourse, Salvo, and Touchstone.
He is the author of the book Education’s End: Its Undoing Explained, Its Hope Reclaimed, and co-author with Robin Phillips of the book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine.
He studied at Messiah University, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University. He and his wife Kristi have two children who are being classically homeschooled.
