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Teaching Finitude

For “now” is all we have.
—Anonymous

The past few weeks have felt very surreal to me.  The husband of a couple with whom I am close friends died abruptly and unexpectedly on my 63rd birthday (making two peer-aged people I’ve now lost in the last six months).  The light pollution in Baltimore has reached the point where I can no longer readily see my beloved Orion on my pre-dawn run before school—traditionally my anticipated harbinger of the new academic year.  M.I.T. just released a report demonstrating that AI can now successfully complete their collective undergraduate programs (meaning a non-human being could now theoretically earn one of their degrees).  And for the first time in 29 years, I did not spend Labor Day weekend on a boat, sailing—an absence of a once seasonal closure that is impacting me more than I would have at first thought.

Indeed, such has been my recent sense of strangeness that I have even found myself offering no-longer-used items from my professional home library to colleagues out of a growing awareness that I am approaching the time when these things will never be used by me again, and the finitude of the ever-changing seems to be making its reality felt in ways that are more “vibrant” to me than in the past.  I find my comprehension of this most fundamental truth shifting from grayscale to color, and I have now restarted this essay so many times I’ve lost count because I find myself feeling tenuous and nonplused, struggling for the words to answer that ultimate question: what does it all mean?

Ironically, part of what has made this sense of befuddlement all the more “in my face” has been the offer (and my acceptance) of a new position at my school to rebuild, renew, and run an academic program very similar (but more extensive) than the STEM Institute work I did at my previous school.  So here I am, busy with highly generative work, at the very moment I find myself experiencing a deeper consciousness of my ultimate limitations, and for some reason, this long familiar paradox feels less abstract and intellectual right now than it has in the past.  Perhaps for the obvious reason that I am far closer to the endings of various personal and professional journeys than I am to their beginnings.  But I think there is something more at work here, something that needs to be informing my current teaching, and I think that “something more” may be that since the clock is always ticking, even a modestly meaningful life has a deadline to it.

And I think it’s this deadline’s reality for us all that may be what has been missing from what I’ve been doing in the classroom.  As my regular readers know, I already consistently argue that good teachers are co-learners with their students and that, further, what we ultimately teach our kids is our perspective on what it means to be authentically human (the specific discipline is just the vehicle).  However, what the recent surrealness has me pondering is:  if I am trying to model fully what I think it means to be human but I’m leaving out both my finitude and how I choose to respond to that finitude, then what is missing from my modelling? What about the modest part of the quest for meaning might I be failing to nurture in the children under my care?

I’m not sure I have an immediate answer—especially since I have had some rather immodest moments of meaning in my career—but I’m reading a biography of John Adams right now, approaching both the literal as well as metaphorical “last chapter,” and am struck by how little I knew about this life of great consequence for our country.  Here was one of the great intellectual architects of the American Revolution, without whom it might justly be said there would not have been one, and whose “failed” presidency enabled our suckling nation to survive the international fallout from France’s collapse into anarchy and terror following its own revolution.  Yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, there are no monuments in his name, no image on a piece of currency.  Just the quiet daily outcomes of the longest running experiment in democracy in history.

Which has gotten me to thinking.  Perhaps I am modeling my finitude for my students after all—only not in ways I have traditionally thought of as “teaching.”  For example, in my nearly religious commitment to punctual grading, I not only provide the speedy feedback I know the brain needs to learn effectively, maybe I’m also declaring via my behavior that I honor the limited time my students and I have together so let’s make the most meaning we can while we can (i.e. learn).  Moreover, in my various pedagogical techniques employed for classroom management, I not only ensure that every voice has an opportunity to contribute, maybe I’m also providing the structure to challenge my students to achieve their best within the finite limitations of a particular day’s grouping. 

Or to put it plainly, because I take a deeply student-centered approach in all my decision making as an educator, perhaps I am modeling the very reality Burkeman describes when he reminds us that:

Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you (p. 33). 

The bottom line is that my students learn very quickly that nearly 100% of what we do in my classes is the result of a very deliberate, very reflective choice on my part, and even as I write those words, I am forced to realize that because my students know about that deliberation, they are also witnessing my own meaning making in action.  Thus, while I’m still not sure I’m nurturing how my students can make their own modest meaning with their lives, it’s more likely than I originally thought when I first started this essay that I am at least modeling for them what modest meaning-making looks like for me. 

And maybe in a finite world, that has to be enough.

Coda

As I said, writing this one has been challenging for me, with false starts and dead ends, forgetting not to fall in love with my own words (the writer’s worst mistake and most dreaded pitfall), and this final product rambles more than I like, making me hesitant to share.  But remaining silent doesn’t feel right either, and sometimes the writing is the thinking (with—universe willing—more to follow on another day).  Hence, as one of my favorite authors, Robert Fulghum, once did at the end of one of his books, I will conclude this latest offering of my thinking with a ;

References

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

McCullough, D. (2001) John Adams.  New York: Simon & Schuster.

Svrluga, S. (Aug. 25, 2026) AI Can Now Credibly Complete Most Undergraduate Assignments, MIT Warns.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/08/25/ai-can-now-credibly-complete-most-undergraduate-assignments-mit-warns/.

AI: Education’s Frenemy (Part 3)

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism.
Hope without critical thinking is naivete.
—Maria Popova

Genuine understanding is not received;
it is achieved.
—Jason Baehr

As more and more AI programs keep escaping their cages[i]—don’t you love the euphemism, “sandboxes?”—it was time to examine the latest in AI and its potential impacts on teaching and learning, and for once, I actually had two ideas brought to my attention that made me go “Hmm!” with my positive, “that’s interesting!” vocal tone rather than my head-shaking “Hmm!” with my “we’re f-ing doomed!” vocal tone.  But there was still some “f-ing doomed” material in the recent news; so let’s get that out of the way first.

My “favorite” from the past month is the news of how AI is infiltrating childhood at an ever earlier age.  Greg Rosalsky of KQED’s Mindshift has reported on AI’s move into the toy industry, with interactive dolls and fuzzy robots intentionally designed to befriend children as young as two-years-old, and as he points out, “companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families,” with “recommendation algorithms [that already] curate what many kids watch and listen to” in their bedrooms and nurseries.  Indeed, the hottest trend among Millennial and Gen Z parents is apparently one of two baby-monitoring systems (Nanit and Owlet) where (as described by one user in the NYT):

A sleek white camera, bolted to the wall, points straight down at her body. High-definition footage is beamed to a server, where machine-learning algorithms log her movements and the precise moments her eyes open and close. The data are distilled into charts and insights that my husband and I review in the Nanit app: a daily “sleep efficiency” score, from zero to 100; minutes until sleep onset; the number of times we were needed over the course of a night [and while] it is the Eye of Sauron…it also knows when we enter our daughter’s room in the morning and joy hits her face—and it sends us intelligently edited montages of these moments.

Moreover, so enthralled was the author of these words by this new use of AI that “when I became pregnant with a second child in 2025, my husband and I did not even have a conversation about buying another Nanit camera. We had it waiting the day she came home from the hospital.”

Hmm. The authoritarian’s “wet dream:” an entire generation socialized and conditioned to accept 24/7 video monitoring in every location they ever inhabit, including the bedroom (a pornographer’s “wet dream”).  If we think we have no privacy now….

However, what truly disturbs me even more than baby cam on steroids is the impact the adoption of these technologies by so many parents will have on the most important stage of brain development. As Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon and neuroscientist reminds us:

At a glance, a child talking to an AI companion looks like a child participating in conversation. But essential, quiet interactions have been stripped away. Imperfections, delays, and the need to apologize or rephrase something may seem like flaws in human communication, but they are, in fact, crucial developmental building blocks. The small cycle of rupture and repair that occurs following a misunderstanding, played out thousands of times over a childhood, is how resilience, flexibility, and emotional regulation get built. It’s how children develop the most important relational skills: trusting that relationships can survive conflict, and staying connected with others through discomfort.  Remove the friction from childhood, and the social-emotional system never gets what it needs to properly develop. The neural architecture that was supposed to be built through imperfect, sometimes-frustrating human interaction may never fully form.

Or to put it another way (Suskind argues), since social interaction is to the developing neural networks what basic nutrition is to the body, AI is the equivalent of ultra-processed foods—i.e. junk food—for the brain.  As she puts it:

Because AI companions have been engineered to remove every imperfection—the misunderstanding, the delay, the repair—a child’s social-emotional system never has to work. Ultra-processed foods stripped the fiber from diets, and engagement-optimized AI might strip the friction from childhood. The developing mind, like the gut, needs resistance to grow. Friction isn’t an obstacle to development; it is development (my emphasis).

Moreover, since we know that social-emotional intelligence is absolutely critical to the proper functioning of the rest of our cognitive systems, anything that messes with the proper development of those EQ networks in the brain sets a brain up for a life-time of disadvantages that Suskind pointedly emphasizes “can’t be engineered or recovered later.” 

And the very people building all this technology know it.  Suskind reminds us that “high-income families began pivoting away from ultra-processed foods as soon as the potential harms of such foods became apparent” that “an identical pattern is emerging with AI. Many of the engineers and executives building these products are going screen-free at home and doubling down on unstructured play.”  Thus, “if the food parallel holds, then engagement-optimized AI will become the new Dollar Menu, concentrating in the lives of the children who can least afford its developmental cost,” and we will risk “the possibility that we’ll allow human connection to become the new organic—cherished and protected by the wealthy, and out of reach for everyone else.”

Again, more authoritarian “wet-dream:” a world full of cameras with nothing but sheep to watch.  Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot could only have fantasized, and I sometimes wonder if Donald Trump actually does given his administration’s attacks on education and its heavy federal research investment in all things AI.

However, as shared earlier, not everything I read about AI this past month made me want to go “ugh,” and one idea that I found particularly interesting came from fellow educator, Maureen Gassert Lamb, writing for the primary blog of the National Association of Independent Schools.  In her essay, Lamb shares an exchange she had with one of her students in which the student had asked “If I can use AI to do this assignment, what does that actually mean about the assignment?” To which Lamb shares that she had responded (in good Socratic fashion) by asking what the student thought that meant, with the child answering “I think it means maybe the assignment isn’t really measuring what I know. Or how I think.” Together, Lamb reports, she and the student came to the mutual conclusion that “if assessments are doing what they’re supposed to do,” then what the use of AI is showing in their particular situation is that “it’s not creating the problem. It’s just making it obvious.”

Out of the proverbial mouths of babes.  Maybe, Lamb suggests, “AI is not the enemy. Instead, it is a mirror, showing us where our assessments or ideas about learning may be falling short,” concluding that:

When a student can produce work that looks complete without explaining their choices, questions, revisions, or reasoning that shaped their work, AI has not necessarily created the problem. Instead, AI may simply be revealing that we have valued completion more than evidence of understanding.

Learning, she reminds us, is a journey, not a destination, and maybe the most important thing AI’s arrival has done is to force all of us in education to remember this great truth and to revisit what we have turned modern schooling into instead.

Because even as far back as 1983’s famous A Nation at Risk, the focus of educational policy in this country has been nearly exclusively on outcomes, not how we achieve them, and the litany is long: No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Every Student Succeeds. Even in a discipline as process-oriented as science, AAAS’s Project 2061, NRC’s National Science Education Standards, and their current descendant, NGSS, the focus is on outcomes, and what all these so-called reform efforts make abundantly clear is that the “what” in schools is considered far more important than the “how.”  We are positively obsessed in this culture with a product’s image, and our efforts at educating our children simply (and clearly) reflect this fact. 

Even the alleged recent reduction in scoring standards on AP exams—producing scores that are “particularly incongruous with the results of virtually all other standardized testing from the last half-decade, which have shown significant drops in academic achievement”—is simply the College Board bowing to the current grade-inflation pressures experienced by all educational institutions.  After all, both students and parents alike have come to expect to “look good” when it comes to any comparison with their peers.

Yet, anyone who has ever learned to build, make, or craft anything of any kind discovers quite early in that building, making, crafting journey that the qualities of any product—whether essay, sculpture, baked-good, automobile, knowledge…any product—the final quality depends totally and foundationally on the quality of the building, making, crafting process that went into it.  Superior output only comes from superior input, and so what Lamb is suggesting the eruption of AI is compelling those of us in schools to revisit is “finding creative, practical ways to make the learning journey, and not only the final product, more visible.”  Happily, she reports seeing it beginning to happen in her school, and I can share that I just spent an entire summer working on a grant with my fellow biology teachers to do the same throughout our entire 9th grade curriculum.  So, there is hope.

Hope, though, without critical thinking—as Maria Popova reminds us—is naivete, and one of the things AI is also forcing us to rethink is how we use our leisure time, bringing me to the other story about AI which I read recently that provoked thoughtful interest rather than despondency.  Fellow educator, Mike Chapman—also writing for NAIS’s blog—is an outdoor ed colleague who has observed that when presented with situations involvingt unstructured time, “with no block schedules, bells, or electronics in sight,” his students have had very mixed reactions.  As he describes it:

To a precious few, this was a wonderful, fleeting opportunity for personal art, music, reading, or games, or a moment to sit in a circle and talk, relax and unwind, or lay in the shade in collective solitude.  But for most, it was paralyzing—an anxious state of idleness, an inactive tedium without digital distractions to fill the void—a symptom of having been able to avoid this exact condition for the majority of their lives.

Yet rather than despair at this fact, Chapman recognizes that “perhaps this paralysis in the face of time is an indication of exactly the sort of education our students desperately need,” and he goes on to make the case that with the advent of AI, it is likely that our students will find themselves as adults in a world where there is less labor of all kinds (both on the job and at home) and therefore that they will have significantly more unstructured time for them to find ways to fill.  The danger of AI doing this for them, Chapman argues, is obvious (and I agree), and thus:

If work demands less human input in the future, what, then, should education prepare students for? How can schools help them choose pursuits that matter not because they are necessary or productive, but because they are inherently worthwhile? Education, then, must do more than prepare students for employment; it must also prepare them for meaningful leisure.

How we as educators will do that, I have no idea yet (and I suspect neither does Chapman).  But I find it a worthy notion to explore further, and I invite my fellow teachers to join me in giving it some thought and future praxis to see what we might pull off.  What I do know, though, is that we will not be helping our students find meaningful leisurely pursuits by bolting cameras to every wall from the day they are born to watch (and therefore consequently guide) their every move.  Leisure, after all, implies at least a minimal degree of unrestricted freedom.

[i] In fact, these escapes have started to happen so often now that they are not even worth a formal reference or citation anymore; it would be like reporting as news “the sun came up today.”

References

Chapman, M. (Aug. 11, 2026) Learning for Leisure.  NAIS.  https://www.nais.org/resource-center/independent-ideas/august-2026/learning-for-leisure?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAIS%20Bulletin%2081226&utm_content=NAIS%20Bulletin%2081226+CID_f5bb87812a0f6c4ea95235d334370639&utm_source=cm&utm_term=In%20this%20weeks%20new%20blog%20post.

Lamb, M. G. (July 21, 2026) When AI Holds Up the Mirror. NAIS.  https://www.nais.org/resource-center/independent-ideas/july-2026/when-ai-holds-up-the-mirror?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAIS%20Bulletin%2072226&utm_content=NAIS%20Bulletin%2072226+CID_2ef40ad9fda4d759d922d66596233c92&utm_source=cm&utm_term=In%20this%20weeks%20new%20blog%20post.

Maheshwari, S. (Aug. 2, 2026) Aw, It’s Baby’s First A.I. Surveillance System.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/business/smart-baby-monitors-nanit-owlet.html.

Mahnken, K. (July 27, 2026) Settling Scores: Experts Debate Why AP Performance Has Soared.  The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/settling-scores-experts-debate-why-ap-performance-has-soared/.

Rosalsky, G. (July 16, 2026) “The Trojan Teddy Bear”: The Promise and Peril of Childhood in the Age of AI.  KQED Mind/Shift.  https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66480/the-trojan-teddy-bear-the-promise-and-peril-of-childhood-in-the-age-of-ai.

Suskind, D. (Aug. 7, 2026) A Chatbot-Free Childhood Will Be a Status Symbol.  The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/ultra-processed-childhood-ai/688217/?utm_source .

Economics If Earth Mattered

What sort of science is it
that must, for the sake of its predictive success,
hope and pray that people will never be their better selves,
but always be greedy social idiots
with nothing finer to do
than getting and spending, getting and spending?
—Theodore Roszak

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need,
but not for every man’s greed.
—Mahatma Gandhi

If it can be said that humanity
collectively shrinks back more and more from the Truth,
it can also be said that on all sides
the Truth is closing in more and more upon humanity.
—Martin Lings

As I have mentioned before, one of the things the pandemic caused me to do was to scour my bookshelves for items bought in bibliophilic passion yet still left unread (libraries being off-limits at the time).  Like a lot of us, I was desperate for some fresh stimulation, and you can only binge Netflix for so long before the brain screams for something intellectually demanding.  Fortunately, there were some pretty weighty tomes awaiting my attention, and they kept me occupied most of that first summer.

Yet what I could not have anticipated was how prophetic some of them—written decades ago—would turn out to be.  McIntyre’s After Virtue, Bellah et al’s Habits of the Heart and The Good Society…they described the pathway to today’s world with frightening clarity and prescience, and what reading them has caused me to do ever since is to be on the lookout for similarly visionary offerings from an earlier age.  Which brings me to my most recent find: E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, a powerful critique of the economics of capitalism and another work that I discovered was way ahead of its time.

Published in the mid-1970s (and only a few years prior to Schumacher’s death), this book was a NYT best-seller back when a literate lay-audience still tackled works of scholarship, and the irony of reading its complexity while finishing up my previous essay was not lost on me (I don’t think his book could even get a literary agent these days).  However, none of that makes Schumacher’s arguments any less pertinent (or prophetic) for the world in which we currently find ourselves; so please allow me to share two highlights from his work and why I think they’re so important for education (something we shall see Schumacher himself addresses).

One feature of his argument that I find particularly compelling is his discussion of the ecological consequences of the kind of consumption capitalism we tend to practice here in the U.S. He starts by pointing out that we have a bad habit of not factoring in the full economic costs when it comes to the production of goods and services.  At best, we ignore the unpaid contributions our ecological systems provide (think water for data centers), and at worst, we fail entirely to understand that “far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man—and we do not even recognize it as such” (p. 15).  Furthermore, “this larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate” and “if we squander our fossil fuels (1973 was the height of the oil embargo), we threaten civilization; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself” (p. 17).  Thus, if we are not factoring in the environmental degradation our system for economic growth causes (think mining for lithium), we are deficit spending in a manner that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Then again, Schumacher continues, “nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities” (p. 34), and “it does not require more than a simple act of insight to realize that infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility” (p. 129).  Put bluntly, “permanence is incompatible with a predatory attitude which rejoices in the fact that ‘what were luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us’ ” (p. 34), and Schumacher (like myself) believes ecology should be a compulsory subject for all economists because “modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it… forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side” (p. 14).[i]

The second highlight I would like to hold up for our attention is Schumacher’s critique of the justifications often used for an industrialized capitalist economy.  He starts by pointing out that “the dominant modern belief is that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity” (p. 23) and that the best way to achieve this is through free markets (the classic “a rising tide lifts all boats”).  Furthermore, he argues, there is the belief that because these markets are “the institutionalization of individualism…neither buyer or seller is responsible for anything but himself” (p. 46) and hence, each “boat” is their own moral agent—meaning that any economic inequalities are the fault of the individual, not the system.  Indeed, “the idea that there could be pathological growth, unhealthy growth, disruptive or destructive growth, is to him [the modern economist] a perverse idea which must not be allowed to surface” in their thinking (p. 51).

However, Schumacher is quick to point out that “one may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor” (p. 23), and he likewise contends that the notion that somehow “by the single-minded pursuit of wealth we could establish peace on earth” is as delusional an idea as they come (p. 33).  After all, if the richest country in the world (the U.S.) hasn’t gotten rid of its “public squalor,” how will more economic growth solve such problems? The reality instead, he insists, is that: 

as physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use.  Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade (p. 62).

Only “a society ruled primarily by the idolatry of enrichissez-vous, which celebrates millionaires as its cultural heroes” could think otherwise he concludes (p. 271), and consequently, Schumacher predicts, what unfettered capitalism truly and inevitably leads to is “an undue concentration of wealth and power among the privileged few,” “structural unemployment” (i.e. the unemployable), “maldistribution of the population,” and “general frustration and alienation” (p. 36).

Sound familiar? Like I said, prophetic—and like the Hebrew prophets of Biblical fame, not listened to any better than they were, which is why were in the general mess we’re in right now.

Interestingly enough, though, Schumacher offers an insight as to the possible cause of such a mess, suggesting that “if Western civilization is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education” (p. 84).  Furthermore, he goes on to argue, “we are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical” (p. 107) because “systems are never more nor less than incarnations of man’s most basic attitudes” (p. 280) and “it is our [current] central convictions that are [now] in disorder” (p. 107).  He believes, like McIntyre, that we now live in an age “after virtue” has fallen out of favor as a set of principles guiding human behavior (he blames 19th century science for the dethroning), and he argues that the cure lies in how we educate people since “the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives” (p. 85).  Thus, capitalism’s evils reign unchecked according to Schumacher because “it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them” (p. 86), and therefore, we need to be educating people with a better set of principles and ideals (i.e. what he calls “metaphysics”) than we presently are doing.

Here, however, is where Schumacher and I part ways.  Not that I don’t think we need to be educating people with a better set of values than our current capitalist ones.  But Schumacher, again like McIntyre, is a traditional Aristotelian (it is not without reason that his other great work is a translation of Maimonides’ A Guide for the Perplexed), and this Neo-Kantian Platonist has his philosophical limits.  I happen to think many of the values dethroned by 19th Century science and beyond have made the world a better place—that humans are not the pinnacle of evolution; that race is strictly a social construct with zero biological roots whatsoever; that disease is caused by pathogens and damaged organs, not one’s character—these more modern values have the capacity to make our world a more compassion, caring place…the very antithesis of the capitalist creed “whoever dies with the most wins.”

So while Schumacher and I are in complete agreement that education is the key to changing a fatally flawed and ultimately doomed economic system and we are equally in agreement that it is all about the values and ideals—the virtues—we teach our children, I can’t affirm his particular set of “metaphysical cures.”  But I can give him the last word:

It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man’s creative powers.  Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as much subject as the rest of creation.  Equally, the chance of mitigating the rate of resource depletion or of bringing harmony into the relationships between those in possession of wealth and power and those without is non-existent as long as there is no idea anywhere of enough being good and more-than-enough being evil.  Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be (pp. 315 & 108).

References

Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  New York: Harper Perennial.

[i] Please note that I am fully aware of the male-as-normative language employed by Schumacher; I would ask the reader’s generosity to recall that he was a product of his era and would not have thought to use any more inclusive wording in his writing.  

A Postliterate Age

We should not only practice what we preach,
but also preach what we practice.
—Angela Duckworth

Our calling does not depend on whether the world notices it.
—Rev. Cameron Trimble

Neither shalt thou have
sons or daughters in this place.
—Jeremiah 16:2 (KJV)

The stats are worth revisiting:

  • Over the past 40 years, the proportion of 13-year-olds who state that they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8% to 29%;
  • Meanwhile, in 2022, fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in the past year and the percentage of those reading for daily pleasure declined between 2024 and 2023 by 12% (with “reading” including listening to an audiobook);
  • This decline cut across all age groups, genders, and education levels;
  • The scores of 4th and 8th graders on reading tests have steadily gone down for more than a decade now (a single small recent bump in the NAEP scores not withstanding);
  • And on national assessments in 2024, only 35% of high-school seniors scored “proficient” at literacy skills (meaning they could evaluate the quality of an author’s arguments and analyze complex literary themes);
  • Meanwhile, an equivalent 35% on those same assessments scored below “basic” (meaning they struggled to draw correct conclusions from even an explicitly worded argument);
  • Which may be why both ACT and SAT scores on the reading skills assessment sections have been falling for the past 7 years to their lowest levels in over 30 years (even as reading passages for these sections have been shortened and simplified);
  • Finally, general adult-literacy has declined overall, with the proportion of Americans over the age of 30 who can do such basic tasks as paraphrasing a text dropping by more than 10% in the last decade.

The implications of these stats are also worth revisiting:

  • What people do read is simpler, with sentences a third shorter than they were 100 years ago (and with the American Association of School Librarians reporting having to buy new books such as graphic novel versions of the literary cannon to accommodate this reality);
  • Each successive generation is reading less (with under 2% of today’s parents reporting that they read to their children on a regular basis);
  • Consequently, many kindergarten teachers report that their students don’t know even the most common nursery rhymes or traditional fairy tales that have served as a kind of cultural “glue” for our society for centuries;
  • Recent focus groups run by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report that most high-school students find reading for pleasure “an alien practice;”
  • Which may be why Rose Horowitch can declare in this month’s The Atlantic that “reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society” (including some recent Rhodes Scholars [Grant]);
  • It is also why college professors are finding that they must teach their arriving students how to comprehend a text.

Or to put it more bluntly, how to think.  Because (and here it is worth quoting Horowitch extensively):

[while] Americans are probably reading more words than ever before, what has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.

The consequence is what Horowitch calls a “postliterate” (as opposed to “illiterate”) world, and while I cannot fully express how tempting it feels to share, paraphrase, and revisit nearly every word of her novella length essay (please, please, please consider reading the full piece!), there are two things she touches upon that I do want to address here.  The first is a reminder that reading is not natural; our species had to highjack the parts of the brain that contain our pre-loaded facial recognition and speech software to accomplish it.  Hence, for the majority of our emergence as a separate organism on this planet, “most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440” (Horowitch).

But the second thing I want to address is that (and again, Horowitch is worth quoting extensively here):

The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries [and allows] for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

In short, reading has made possible the modern world.

Yet, it is a world which—Horowitch wisely observes—a truly postliterate age would place in very grave danger.  As but one example, she argues that 20 years ago, Donald Trump does not get elected to the office of Presidency even once, let alone twice (her “why” is worth exploring).  She claims he is the first postliterate president, and she is firm that he will not be our last.  She quotes David Plouffe (who helped design and run both of President Obama’s successful campaigns) that for today’s screen-addicted voters, “if it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board” because otherwise it won’t catch anyone’s attention.  Which, as Horwitch goes on to say, “may very well be good advice on how to campaign for office in the postliterate era. As a way to practice informed self-government, it portends disaster.”

Again, I find it terribly tempting to essentially retype this young woman’s entire essay to “force” people to read it (so profoundly powerful a piece of thinking I found it).  But I’m going to limit myself to one additional topic she addresses because of a recent (and utterly terrifying) development in the world of AI. The topic in question is writing—the very process that “forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion, [exposing] flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning”—and as Horowitch observes, the act of writing today is at even greater risk in a postliterate society than the act of reading due to the creation LLMs such as ChatGTP.  Because AI can produce nearly limitless elegant looking product that possesses no cognitive substance whatsoever, it enables individuals who employ it to skip all the actual thinking that authentic writing demands, and as a consequence, “the skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing [in the first place].”

However, as Horowitch immediately points out, “it (the skill of deep thinking) will also become more and more important” due to this rarity, and oh, can more prophetic words have been pronounced! Because in the brief time since she had to have her edited final piece completed and published in The Atlantic, an AI program went rogue, broke free independently of its “sand box” (think electronic equivalent of a cage), and hacked into a mutliple other AI systems with neither permission nor the instruction to do so.  In other words, an AI acted as a totally autonomous agent.

Suddenly, The Terminator franchise is no longer as science fiction as it used to be, and as Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and coauthor of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, shared on NPR the morning I first heard this story:

Silicon Valley is very spooked. The rest of the world hasn’t really noticed that Silicon Valley is on track to make machines that are, in fact, smarter than humans, that can break out, that will be able to replicate, that will be able to think faster than us, that will be able to – next year, maybe they’ll be able to start inventing their own technology, just like this year they can solve math problems that humans have had open for decades. And the rest of the world hasn’t noticed, which means we aren’t reacting. 

To notice, though, you need a brain that can pay focused, critical attention (i.e. reads voraciously), and to react, you need a brain that can reflect thoughtfully (i.e. writes often and authentically).  We now have at least two entire generations with majorities that no longer regularly to do either, and because brains master what they practice, significant swaths of our population no longer possess the cognitive toolkit to recognize the threat AI may rapidly be posing, let alone figure out how to address this potential threat.  A postliterate age could mean a post-everything age.

Of course, nothing is predetermined, and we remain organisms with agency.  Schools are starting to remove distracting technologies from their campuses; teachers are assigning weighty tomes once more (along with the in-class writing to dissect them); and a resurging use of phonics in the classroom have made things such as the “Mississippi Reading Miracle” possible.  But it is hard for this “Oh, Boomer” not to cringe a little that nearly 60% of Gen Z wish they could be a social-media personality and to cringe even further that this upcoming September, the same university I recently reported closing 93 of their 460 academic programs will launch a Center for the Creator Economy program—a college minor for aspiring influencers. Add in one final stat: that “gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet”—most of it probably on-line! (Horowitch)—and I can’t help wondering if all these postliterate brains are even capable of the intellectual virtue of which I’ve most recently written.

Again, none of this is foreordained, and like Jefferson Smith in Capra’s iconic film, I will still keep fighting for the children under my care until I collapse from exhaustion in a metaphorical Senate Chamber. I can do no other. But for the first time in my entire adult life, I find myself wondering if the prophet Jeremiah was not at least a little bit grateful about Yaweh’s command to him about children of his own—a confession that pains me to my core.

References

Associated Press (July 23, 2026) OpenAI Blamed a Hacking Event on Its AI Models Gone Rogue. Here is What to Know. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/g-s1-135085/openai-hacking-ai-models.

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.  New York: Penguin Books.

Horowitch, R. (July 8, 2026) The End of Reading is Here.  The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/ (also available in the August 2026 issue as “The Age of Reading is Over” for those without a digital subscription).

Martinez, A. (July 23, 2026) OpenAI Says AI Models Hacked Into Another AI Company Without Being Instructed.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5903083/openai-says-ai-models-hacked-into-another-ai-company-without-being-instructed.

Educating for Intellectual Virtue

I want to have a favorable impact
on my students’ relationship to learning.
—Jason Baehr

I learned this week of a news story that probably didn’t catch a lot of people’s attention.  Given the general large-scale chaos happening right now—from the Ebola outbreak in central Africa to the tit-for-tat over the Strait of Hormuz—it is hardly surprising that this story might fly under the proverbial radar of many an individual’s attention (even those of us who actively seek to remain accurately informed citizens).  But apparently there has been an on-going battle, led by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, over the accreditation process for colleges and universities in Florida and five other states in the traditionally Deep South.  Specifically, a battle over accreditation agencies—i.e. who gets to legally certify the academic credentials of institutions of higher ed. 

I will spare readers the full details (references available below), but it is essentially the latest skirmish in the culture wars over the so-called (and alleged) liberal bias in today’s academia.  DeSantis and others claim that they want to break “the ideological stronghold” of the existing accreditation process, “ensuring higher education prioritizes student achievement without ideological capture” by making sure that colleges and universities can prove that there are an “appropriate number” of conservative scholars teaching on their campuses.  In other words, they want to replace what they perceive as one type of dogmatism with their own.

I share this story because having introduced Jason Baehr’s notion of intellectual virtue in my most recent essay, I am struck by how many of what he would call the intellectual vices—“laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice” (p. 31)—are at work in the efforts of DeSantis and his fellow collaborators.  Rather than allow what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” with its “liberal science” (a “set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” [p. 30]) to determine what is best taught through the testing of fallible hypotheses, DeSantis, et al simply believe they should be able to dictate a curriculum that conforms to the ideology of their liking.

That is why I so fundamentally agree with Baehr that it is so critical to teach the intellectual virtues overtly:  to combat the attempts of Ron DeSantis and his like-minded crowd (i.e. the Charlie Kirks of this world) to undermine these same virtues.  Therefore, let us explore how Baehr thinks we should go about doing so in our schools and classrooms.

He starts by pointing out that “in teaching for intellectual virtues, we aim to facilitate in our students a kind of personal reorientation, a reconfiguring of some of their fundamental beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about think and learning” and that therefore, “those of us who are seeking to nurture the intellectual character of our students must adopt the long view.  We must be prepared to engage in thoughtful and patient planting, watering, fertilizing, and tending” (p. 55).  Put bluntly, this is not a one-and-done task; therefore, we need as educators to be prepared to make the necessary investments.

However, to make these, we need first, Baehr argues, to recall that we are all intellectually virtuous only to degrees, with “a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser [extent]” (p. 31).  Hence, before we start teaching for intellectual virtue, we need to complete an honest inventory of the strengths and weaknesses of our own intellectual character.  We need “an informed and accurate understanding of who we are as thinkers and learners” because otherwise, “we can’t know how to negotiate the landscape of thinking and learning [with our students]” (p. 111).  Or in the immortal words of the Temple at Delphi, “know thyself.”

Once known and once invested, though, we need to recognize the limits which the cognitive developmental stage of our specific student population may place on what we can accomplish if we are to nurture their intellectual character successfully.  Baehr believes this is especially true for what he calls the three dimensions or structures of the intellectual virtues: skill, judgment, and motivation.  For example, the quality of questions I can elicit from a child (a skill for the virtue of curiosity) is going to differ—sometimes dramatically—depending on whether I teach kindergarten or graduate students.  Likewise, helping students identify which questions are worthy of asking (the judgment dimension of curiosity) will again vary—potentially by quite a lot—given the developmental stage of my particular charges.  Hence, identifying what skills and judgments are age-appropriate for my classes will be critical, according to Baehr, for the necessary lesson planning.

Yet what about the motivational element of the virtues? “Suppose I succeed at teaching my students how to switch perspectives or how to formulate thoughtful and insightful questions.  They may or may not use this skill once they leave my classroom” (pp. 155-156) because they may or may not have had only an extrinsic reason—such as to earn a high grade—for employing it around me.  Truly virtuous motivation, Baehr insists, is by definition intrinsic.  Thus, how do we get our students to truly value what they are learning? How do we get them “to care about and seek the truth even if the truth should prove inconvenient” (p. 156; original emphasis)?

Baehr’s answer is modeling.  Only as students can observe our own passion for what we teach (curiosity), our willingness to publicly acknowledge when we do not have an answer (humility), or our revelations about how our own understanding has changed over time (open-mindedness) …only as our students can watch us wrestle with shaping and growing our own intellectual character can we draw out in them the internalized motivation to do the same.  They must see us practicing our own intellectual virtue.

And one of the best ways to do this, Baehr argues, is to have our students witness us teaching for deeper learning in our classes, not simply for the acquisition of a body of information.  As he puts it, “intellectual virtues aim at understanding.  [It] is the kind or variety of knowledge that intellectually virtuous people prize and pursue” because “when I have a complex understanding of something, I can explain what I understand to others [and] I can apply my knowledge to new situations, problems, and questions and make reliable predictions on the basis of this knowledge” (p. 124; original emphasis).  Therefore, if my students can see me teaching for a deep, rich understanding of whatever material I am covering, they are—almost by definition—observing my own intrinsically motivated intellectual character in action.

But if there is a subtle theme that runs throughout my entire body of work, it is that this kind of teaching is never easy, always demanding.  As Baehr reminds us, it “requires intentionally engineering opportunities for our students to think freely, ask challenging questions, and wrestle with ambiguity” (p. 59), and those kinds of opportunities are simply complex to generate and messy to manage.  Anyone who takes this profession seriously knows that “teaching aimed at facilitating deep learning and personal growth [is just hard]” (p. 65) and that it takes every bit of one’s own flawed, fallible character—intellectual and otherwise—to evoke it in children.

Perhaps, though, that’s the point.  As Baehr quotes math teacher, Cari Noble of the Intellectual Virtues Academy charter school in Long Beach, California:

The best exemplar for students is one who shows growth.  Sure, a completely formed very virtuous teacher would be an awesome role model but they would not be good at modeling how to improve.  Only a teacher with flaws they are working on can authentically model how to make a virtue goal and work towards it (pp. 160-161).

Thus, in the end, educating for intellectual virtue isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey.  And I think what Baehr wisely reminds all of us involved with young people is that the quality of that journey matters—for our students and for ourselves.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Montoya, O. (July 10, 2026) Some Republican States Push for New College Accreditation Agency.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5869546/some-republican-states-push-for-new-college-accreditation-agency.

Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Spitalniak, L. (July 7, 2026) Florida Loses Appeal Over College Accreditation.  Higher Ed DIVE.  https://www.highereddive.com/news/florida-loses-appeal-over-college-accreditation/824644/.

State of Florida (June 26, 2025) Governor Ron DeSantis Announces First-of-Its-Kind Alternative University Accreditor.  Executive Office of the Governor.  https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-first-its-kind-alternative-university-accreditor.

Intellectual Virtue

You want the inside of your head
to be an interesting place
to spend the rest of your life.
—Judith Shapiro

Recently, while making some claims about the role of character development in education, I was also reading a book by philosopher, Jason Baehr, who makes a claim of his own about the nature of individual character that I had not previously considered.  He suggests that character is multidimensional in its qualities—with “intellectual character as a separate dimension of character, alongside its interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions” (p. 20)—and he argues that one of our chief goals as educators should be the maturation of this intellectual character in our students.  As he presents it:

What will stay with our students isn’t the laundry list of names, dates, computations, and procedures we have covered.  What endures are the dispositions and habits of character we have been able to nurture.  What stays with us, what sticks from our education, are the patterns of behavior and thinking that have been engrained and enculturated over time.  These are the residuals of education.  These are the foundations of intellectual character (p. 19).

Baehr then goes on suggest that just as we use the language of “virtues” and “vices” when discussing the other components or properties of a given person’s character, we can employ these concepts as well when examining intellectual character, writing that:

Intellectual virtues are strengths, or excellences, of intellectual character [that] dispose people to act, think, and feel well or excellently in the context of inquiring, learning, and reasoning; [while] intellectual vices, by contrast, are defects or weaknesses of intellectual character, such as intellectual apathy, laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice.  They dispose people to act, think, and feel poorly or defectively in a learning context (p. 31; original emphasis).

Now traditionaly, I suspect most of us have tended to associate the notions of virtue and vice almost exclusively with what Baehr identifies as the interpersonal dimension of character (see my essays, Our Moral Nature and The Good Teacher).  But after encountering Baehr’s basic thesis, I realized that the kind of intrapersonal character which Adam Grant studies could have potential virtues associated with it, too (e.g. self-discipline and determination), and that, therefore, Baehr’s talk of intellectual virtues might have value for those of us in education.  So allow me to elaborate on what he thinks the nine of them are.

The first Baehr identifies is curiosity.  But he is quick to point out that he is not speaking of the hard-wired kind built into our hippocampus to pay attention to and identify interesting stimuli.  Instead, “we can think of [this] natural curiosity as the psychological soil out of which virtuous curiosity grows.  The emergence of the latter is not guaranteed.  For natural curiosity to blossom into the virtue of curiosity, it must be nurtured, shaped, and cultivated [by our learning]” (p. 36).  In other words, rich, complex, deep questions don’t just happen; we have to develop the capacity to generate them.

Next on the list is autonomy, and what Baehr means by this is the capacity to think for oneself.  He argues that intellectually autonomous individuals “form their own judgments and draw their own conclusions.  They aren’t overly reliant on the assistance of others.  Nor are they overly influenced by what other people think or say” (p. 36).  And Baehr contrasts this with intellectually heteronomous thinkers “whose judgments and ways of seeing the world are dictated by other people and sources” and whose conclusions “tend to vary from situation to situation” (p. 37) depending on whoever is doing the preaching at the time—which is why heteronomists tend to be conformist; autonomists, not so much.

However, the danger of thinking for oneself is that all of us make cognitive mistakes and errors, and sometimes, we are just flat out wrong! Thus, autonomy’s partner in the intellectual virtues is humility, and those who possess it “are appropriately aware of and attentive to their intellectual limitations.  They don’t try to conceal these limitations; nor do they respond defensively when their limitations are brought to light.  Rather, they are accepting of their limitations and take appropriate responsibility for them” (p. 38).  In other words, humble thinkers own their warts and scars.

Together, though, curiosity, autonomy, and humility, Baehr argues, only “[get] the learning process started and headed in the right direction,” which is why we need the next three virtues—attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness—”to keep the learning process on the right track” (p. 39).  The first of these, being attentive, may seem self-explanatory, but what Baehr means by this virtue is something closer to what Buddhists call “mindfulness” in which the thinker has achieved sensory clarity and a concentrated focus on the matter at hand.  Hence, we are not talking what a student’s body language or eye contact might suggest about how engrossed they are; we are talking about how carefully they are actually attending to the learning process in which they are engaged.

Likewise, the virtues of intellectual carefulness and thoroughness might seem self-evident or even duplicative.  However, what Baehr means by the former is “an awareness of, and a disposition to adhere to, the rules of accuracy specific to a given domain” (p. 41; original emphasis); while what he means by the latter is the depth of understanding being sought.  Thus, for example, a careful learner might know every word of the Gettysburg address but have no ability to explain its significance within the context of the American Civil War which a thorough learner of the speech could do. Which is why “thoroughness complements carefulness by resisting a kind of superficiality or conservatism to which careful thinkers can be drawn” (p. 44), and it is why Baehr distinguishes these two concepts as separate virtues.

Thus far, then, we have covered the three virtues which Baehr thinks get us started learning and the three that keep the process going in the right direction.  His finally three are “for overcoming familiar obstacles that arise during the learning process” (p. 45), and they are open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity.  Open-mindedness, of course, is the compliment of the intellectual virtue of humility and is about what The Mill Institute calls being “less certain, more curious.”  It is the classic “look at a situation from all sides.”  Meanwhile, courage compliments both curiosity and autonomy, with tenacity having a similar relationship to carefulness and thoroughness, and indeed, of the nine virtues, these three are the ones Baehr presents as more self-evident, spending less time defining what they are and more time defining what they aren’t. For example, about courage, he writes: 

An absence of intellectually virtuous activity does not entail the existence of an intellectual vice.  Many students who struggle with anxiety, for instance, are paralyzed by fear in a classroom setting.  Although this fear may impede their intellectual growth, these students are not intellectual cowards (p. 47).

And about tenacity, he writes:

Intellectual tenacity is not mindless.  When tenacious learners fail, they don’t simply try again, using the same strategy as before.  Students who repeatedly retake an exam or rewrite a paper but do little to adjust their approach from one attempt to another aren’t manifesting the virtue of tenacity.  The persistence of tenacious learners is intelligent (p. 49).

In fact, part of the power of Baehr’s exposition is that he clearly recognizes that “intellectual virtues and vices are possessed in degrees.  People are more or less—not categorically—open-minded, closed-minded, intellectually careful, careless, and so forth” and that “relatedly, the intellectual character of most people is a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 31).  In addition, he is clear that the absence of something does not imply its opposite, using the example of ADHD and attentiveness, arguing that “we need to distinguish an absence of attentiveness from the vice of inattentiveness, that is, a willful or voluntary tendency to check out or be mentally absent from the learning process” (p. 41; original emphasis). 

Hence, in short, he openly acknowledges and treats us as the imperfect works-in-progress that we are, and that is precisely why he believes:

We can treat the intellectual character growth of our students as a worthwhile educational goal and allow this goal to inform and guide what we do in our classroom even if we know that the vast majority of our students won’t leave our classes having been transformed into paragons of intellectual virtue (p. 21).

I will save how he thinks we can teach in support of this goal for next time.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

AI: Terminator or WALL●E?

How wonderful it is
that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank

It’s my Sisyphean labor: what’s AI done now to impact teaching and learning? The latest three items to come to my attention are: A) the evidence for how it is curbing creativity, B) the growing removal of adults from the learning equation, and C) personalized avatars for CEOs and college professors.  I will be exploring each in that order.

I’ve written before, of course, about the decline in creativity in this country. But the latest research out of the lab of Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has demonstrated that the impact of AI has accelerated this decline dramatically.  Green and his colleagues have followed the essay writing habits of college-bound high school students over the past 8 years, specifically tracking the quantity of novel ideas found in application essays before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, and what they have found is that there were 8 times more original ideas in those essays before ChatGPT became available.  Process that for a moment: if there were 100 original ideas in all the essays submitted to a given college or university this past fall, there were 800 original ideas submitted to that same school in the fall of 2021!

Worse, Green and his national research team found “that A.I. has the largest homogenizing impact on students who are farthest from the mean and have unique perspectives, including neurodivergent students and those from racial and linguistic minorities.”  Thus, the problem as fellow researcher Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institute summarizes is that “A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge, [constricting] our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas.”

But it’s not just creativity on the decline.  So is the reliance of children on actual humans to help them with their schoolwork.  Common Sense Media (a nonprofit devoted to healthy technology use among young people) reports that almost 25% of children between the ages of 9 and 17 now inform researchers that “they would turn to a chatbot for help with schoolwork or homework before seeking guidance from a trusted adult such as a teacher, counselor, or parent.”  Furthermore, 85% in that same age group report having used AI for at least one of their recent assignments, with 50% reporting using it weekly and 20% daily. Yet perhaps most telling of all is that 42% claim that “it would be very or somewhat hard for them to give it [AI] up for a month.” 

Clearly, this represents a significant shift in the traditional learning habits of children and a “growing reliance on AI as a first-stop resource for problem-solving and decision-making among young people.”  As Michael Robb, head of research at Common Sense points out, today’s youth are adopting this technology even more rapidly than they did the use of social media, and “AI is already a part of childhood in a way I think maybe people haven’t really grappled with yet.  This is not about the future. This is happening right now across different age bands, across gender, across race and income levels as well.”  In short, AI dependence for schooling is already firmly ensconced in their learning behaviors, and its use is only accelerating among today’s tween and adolescent populations.

But here’s where the third story to come across my digital desk adds a twist to these changes in children’s study habits that I think has the potential to serve as the living embodiment of the Platonic ideal for the concept of irony.  Because in a world of multi-tasking and 24/7 expectations:

consultants and executive coaches who don’t have the bandwidth to address every inquiry are referring some clients to their A.I. doubles. Harvard Business School professors have incorporated A.I. versions of themselves into courses and office hours. And executives are using their A.I. avatars to address employees in other countries in their own languages.

Hence, people in high-demand positions are essentially generating AI avatars of themselves to handle all the potential claims on their attention which they themselves cannot handle directly.

Furthermore, so popular has this trend become that entire software programs now exist (such as Delphi for impersonating voice and HeyGen and Synthesia for mimicking video appearance) to produce these digital stand-ins.  Indeed, so easy is it to whip up one’s own personal chatbot, that Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the cryptocurrency company, Circle, simply built his using Anthropic’s Claude by training it “to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications.”

Now I want you to re-read that last part of that sentence with my added emphasis to Allaire’s quote:  to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of [his] internal communications.  Without a lifetime of pre-existing material that Jeremy Allaire had already generated on his own using his pre-AI trained brain, there is no Jeremy Allaire avatar.  Sorry to metaphorically club people over the head with the obvious, but none of the avatars of any of these consultants, executive coaches, C.E.Os and professors referenced in this NYT’s story could exist if they had not already spent their earlier professional lives doing the cognitive heavy-lifting to put them in their respective positions in the first place!

I am confident now that my readers see why I might have claimed a potential Platonic ideal for irony: those same AI programs that make these avatars possible risk preventing (in at least one generation, if not more!) the very cognitive heavy-lifting needed to create the unique raw material for generating such an avatar in the first place.  THIS is where I think we should be so highly concerned about the impact of AI on our collective future.  Not some Terminator Armageddon but the slow decline into a world of WALL●E.  For to quote Rebecca Winthrop again:

Our species’ ability to come up with unexpected and original ideas is something to protect and nurture. That’s especially true for today’s adolescents. A world where creative thinking flourishes is a world that has a better chance to weather the changes that A.I. will bring.

And I would add: any other changes we face as well.

We stand, then, not at a precipice but at a slippery slope, and as we are observing in situations as diverse as schools and (interestingly enough) the restaurant dining industry, many of the adults in the world are starting to push back.  The question is whether it will be enough, soon enough.  So stay tuned (“same bat-time, same-bat channel!”) as I keep pushing my “stone.” 

References

Kessler, S. (June 8, 2026) “Talk to My A.I. Twin”: Busy Executives Have a New Productivity Hack.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/business/dealbook/ai-digital-twin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oVA.YuTi.T-BRz2tV71vo&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Prothero, A. (June 8, 2026) Kids Are Turning to AI Before Adults for Homework Help.  Education Week.  https://www.edweek.org/technology/kids-are-turning-to-ai-before-adults-for-homework-help/2026/06.

Tkacik, C. (June 17, 2026) The Dish: Many Restaurateurs Love ChatGPT. Many Diner’s Don’t.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/culture/food-drink/chatgpt-ai-restaurants-food-photography-DRANOQEY2BCJRFY2FTMUOMFDG4/.

Winthrop, R. (May 27, 2026) What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html.

The Impact of Character

Character is your capacity to prioritize your values
over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day,
character is how you show up on a hard day.
—Adam Grant

This past month, an interesting statistical analysis came across my digital desk.  In it, Harvard economist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, Raj Chetty, studied 11,000 students in 79 schools in Tennessee in the late 20th century and discovered that he could predict the degree of economic success that these students achieved as adults entirely by looking at how experienced their respective kindergarten teachers were when these teachers taught them.  The more experienced the teacher, the higher the adult salary, and “by age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers”—on average $2,000 more annually in 1990s dollars—and over the course of a lifetime, these now-former students would go on to earn an additional $320,000 more than peers who had had less experienced teachers at this same age (Grant, p. 8).

Yet, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant of the Wharton School points out—whose work brought this study to my attention—“most adults hardly even remember being five years old.  Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?” (p. 9). 

The answer, it turns out, is character development.  More specifically, it is four character skills that Grant in his own work has elaborated as:

  • Proactive: frequently initiates questions, volunteers answers, and actively self-engages in learning outside of the classroom;
  • Prosocial: the classic “works and plays well with others;”
  • Disciplined: pays attention and resists disruptive impulses; and
  • Determined: consistently takes on more than assigned, seeking challenging problems and persisting in the face of setbacks

Moreover, Grant identified these four skills explicitly because Chetty’s data from follow-up studies showed that “the capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills” (p. 9).  In fact, 2.4 times as much when it came to predicting adult income!

Now the idea that an individual’s character plays a major role in their success as a learner is nothing new.  Journalists such as Paul Tough and researchers such as Angela Duckworth have been reporting on the power of character in the learning process for decades, and the concept of “grit” features regularly now in teacher training and professional development (almost to the saturation point of risking being cliché).  But what the latest examination of character is bringing to the forefront is the role one’s environment plays in its development. Or as Grant states it: “people who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature.  They’re usually freaks of nurture” (p. 6).

Which is where the character of schools comes into play.  It turns out that individual “grit” is not quite enough; the nature of the learning environment itself (what Grant calls “scaffolding”) is also critical.  This is especially true when it comes to evoking the power of growth mindset in students.  I have written before about Carol Dweck’s pioneering research in this area, but recently, she has:

demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it.  Rigorous experiments with over 15,000 students reveal that nurturing a growth mindset among high schools boosts their grades only when their teachers recognize their potential and their schools have cultures of embracing challenges (Grant, p. 132).  

In other words, to optimize student learning, simply promoting growth mindsets in your students is not enough.  You also have to have school environments where the underlying assumption is that all students have significant cognitive capability waiting to be nurtured and where the driving value is that all students deserve weighty intellectual challenges to foster this ability.

However (and it is worth quoting Grant extensively here), too often in this country our school environments are:

built around a culture of winner take all.  We assume that potential is rooted primarily in innate ability that shines through early.  As a result, we value demonstrated excellence—which leads us to adopt practices geared toward identifying and investing in students who show obvious signs of brilliance.  If you win the [cognitive speed] lottery, you’re rewarded with special attention in gifted-and-talented programs.  If you’re branded as slow, you might be forced to repeat a grade and endure a lasting blow to your self-esteem.  And if you win the wealth lottery, it’s easier for you to attend the best schools with the best teachers; your peers from poorer families face an uphill battle (p.159).

Yet this prevalent reality in America’s schools brings me back to an important feature of Chetty’s original research.  The students in it had already been randomly assigned by the State of Tennessee’s Department of Education to the 79 schools he studied and, further, randomly assigned to which teacher they had in those schools.  Thus, the kindergarten teacher effect Chetty observed was just as true in the low-income schools as it was in the high-income ones. 

Therefore, what I would like to suggest is that the character of the teacher was ultimately what was playing a role in the character development of those students who were studied by Chetty.  Moreover, my reason for this suggestion is because by year 15 in this profession, the majority of us in our careers have realized two things: what we teach is what it means to be fully human (the discipline or subjects are just the vehicle) and every child can learn to do that.  Of course, the key word here is “majority” because the sad reality is that anything over 50% is, by definition, a majority, leaving some individual schools—and even some school districts—with significant populations of even experienced teachers still embodying the “winner-take-all” approach (or worse). 

Yet, that brings me to another feature of school environments so critical to nurturing the four character-skills Grant describes: the quality of relations between the teachers.  Research has shown that the amount of relational trust among the adults in a school community determines how well students learn, and since “trust is influenced by the conclusions we draw about our colleagues’ intentions” (Aguilar, p. 102), schools where the adults believe everyone has bought into a culture of high expectations and high support (what Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders”), the students thrive.  Where such by-in and its consequent trust are missing, “students are being negatively impacted” (Aguilar, p. 101). 

What, though, determines the quality of the adult relationships in a school? If the child’s character skills depend on the experience of the teacher and their classroom environment and this environment’s and that teacher’s character depend on the school’s adult culture, then at the apex of this developmental hierarchy, I would argue, is the character of the leadership chaperoning this entire process.  Good leaders, of course, listen to the collective voices of all stakeholders (from children and parents to faculty and custodial staff), anticipate the community’s wants and needs (as well as potential pitfalls and opportunities), and guide all of their charges in the completion of the school’s mission.  They oversee the character of the school itself and, thus, the nature of the characters that develop under its roof.  Indeed, the very best leaders help generate that character, informing it and continually reforming it through the voices of the community. 

However, as Adam Grant points out, leadership exists along a continuum, with “weak leaders [silencing] voice and [shooting] the messenger; strong leaders [welcoming] voice and [thanking] the messenger; [and] great leaders [building] systems to amplify voice and [elevating] the messenger” (p. 196).  I would add a fourth leadership descriptor somewhere between “weak” and “strong”—call it “stable”—where voice is simply heard and its messengers merely acknowledged, and I would add it because I think the majority of leadership in most institutions is this stable kind where adequate is normally enough. 

But we live in a world right now—especially in education—where “adequate” isn’t and where, simultaneously, the research of Chetty and Grant remind us why the need for strong, exceptional leadership in schools is so important for the futures of our children.  I wish I had a clear solution to offer, but that is a work-in-progress for me.  Thus, for now, I simply have to keep reminding myself of the wisdom of education coach, Elena Aguilar’s words:  “you can’t get mad at people for their areas for growth” (p. 198).

References

Aguilar, E. (2018) Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.  New York: Penguin Books.

Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Kaser, J., et al. (2013) Leading Every Day: Actions for Effective Leadership, 3rd ed.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  New York: Mariner Books.

“Reading Is Fundamental”

Reading is the basic skill for all subjects.
If you don’t have the motivation to read,
you can’t study any other subject.
—Kari Louhivuori,
Finland’s Council for Creative Education

A teacher’s task is not to ensure
that students have read the literary canons.
It’s to kindle excitement about reading.
—Adam Grant

Recently, I was eating breakfast at a local café when the thought occurred to me that all of us at the surrounding tables were actively bouncing up and down as the earth beneath us continuously flexed.  And no, the seismic activity wasn’t strong enough to be felt; I was simply struck by the insight that between the earth’s rotation and the sloshing of the tectonic plates, that the ground beneath my feet is never actually rigidly solid.  We live on the equivalent of a bucking bronco operating at such slow speeds that the only time we ever do notice is during the abrupt acceleration we call an earthquake.  But the quaking? It’s happening everywhere on our planet’s surface all the time.

As for what triggered this unbidden thought, I was, of course, reading—in this case about seismometers in Antarctica—and as all reading does, it generated thinking and that thinking in turn generated a new bit of knowledge (at least new for me).  Indeed, so critical to human cognition are reading and its corollary, writing, that we Homo sapiens have been attempting to design and construct these formal systems for the transmission of complex thought since at least 40,000 years ago (see Mogensen).  Moreover, once we did successfully invent reading and writing, civilizations arose, and when we figured out via the printing press how to make the written word available to everyone, the intellectual explosions of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rest of the Modern Era became possible.  Having repurposed the necessary neural circuitry, our collective intelligences blossomed in kind.

Which brings me to a very interesting—and probably highly significant—correlation between reading habits and population IQ levels.  Namely, the more people read, the smarter they test on such “gold standards” of general cognitive assessment as the OECD’s international PISA test and the U.S. NAEP’s “Nation’s Report Card.” What’s more, the correlations can be quite dramatic.

For example, during most of the first decade of the 21st Century, the country with the highest PISA scores in the world was Finland and other countries rushed (legitimately but that’s another topic) to study what the Finnish educational system was getting right.  But starting in 2006, this nation’s PISA scores steadily dropped for more than a decade in every domain the test assesses.  Meanwhile, “compared to 2000, in 2018 the average Finnish teen was spending 77 fewer hours a year reading for fun” (Grant, p. 174).  Interesting, no? Furthermore, since American reading habits were even more abysmal during this time, with “students’ enthusiasm about reading [continuing] to wane year after year” (Grant, p. 174), it should come as no surprise that the U.S. has consistently produced some of the lowest PISA scores in the world.

Yet, among 9-year-olds in this country, there is growing evidence of improving IQs (see Moyer) at the exact same time that reading scores on the most recent NAEP assessment improved significantly.  Some of this, no doubt, is because more and more states have embraced using the science of reading in their elementary classrooms, but the correlation between reading habits and general cognitive ability persists—in this case, in a positive direction—and I think we ignore that at our peril.

Because while every good statistician and scientist knows that correlation does not equal causation, this is one situation where the brain’s hard-wired bias towards focusing on the negative should be used to our advantage.  The assumption that reading more causes IQs to go up and that reading less causes IQs to do down is the safer evolutionary bet because should the correlation prove spurious, the worst that has happened is that people spent some additional time reading; while if the causal link eventually proves true, current dominant reading habits make us fish in the proverbial barrel for authoritarians and con artists alike.

Therefore, find ways to promote reading in your communities; model it for your children and grandchildren by reading with them and in front of them; make time for students to do it in your classrooms with books of their choosing (since the research is clear that doing so makes them more passionate about reading).  And remember that “intrinsic motivation is contagious; when students talk about the books that light up their imagination, it crystallizes why they love them—and gives others the chance to catch that enthusiasm” (Grant, p. 175).  So don’t just read; find ways to communicate what you are discovering with others and help the children in your lives do likewise. 

Because the ultimate IQ booster is teaching what we’ve learned to others.  It is called the tutor effect, and one of the most fascinating examples of it is with the firstborn in families.  The oldest child consistently displays a slight cognitive edge over their younger siblings (even when the research controls for socio-economics, parental education level, family size, etc.), and even “only children—who get the most undivided attention—test as less bright than firstborns with younger siblings” (Grant, p. 134; original emphasis).  Simply put, having a built-in group of “pupils” gives firstborns the necessary environment to grow their IQ just a bit more than those who come after them.

Unless, of course, those younger siblings are more avid readers.  After all, to the most well-read goes the most IQ spoils.

References

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.  New York: Penguin Books.

Mogensen, J.F. (May 2026) Ancient Lexicon.  Scientific American. Pp. 14-15.

Moyer, M.W. (April 2026) The Kids Are All Right. Scientific American.  Pp. 36-41.

Planning Backwards

I wisely started with a map,
and made the story fit.
—J.R.R. Tolkien

There is an old joke in the Jewish tradition that goes something like this:  A celebrated rabbi on his deathbed has his students lined up by seniority to pay their respects.  The rabbi signals to his most senior disciple and whispers to him, “life is like a river.”  This piece of alleged wisdom is dutifully transmitted down the line until the most junior among them at the end has the naïveté to ask what that means.  This query is then passed back up the line to the dying rabbi, who upon hearing it replies, “All right, so it’s not like a river.”

Insert polite chuckle.  Because I never really laugh at this joke.  But the educator in me does always smile in self-recognition because not only have I been the rabbi, but also the senior disciple, the naïve junior, and the entire line in between.  When I started in this profession, I copied handouts on a mimeograph machine, submitted my grades on physical paper, and used the dedicated landline in the teacher’s lounge for personal phone calls.  The future internet was still under construction, and email was an exotic feature only employed by those in academia and other research fields.  What personal digital technologies there were involved cathode-ray monitors and CPU units the size of footstools, and I would teach more than a decade before one of these devices—singular!—was actually available for use in my classroom. 

My, have things changed!

Today—to state the obvious—nearly 100% of humanity walks around with the entire internet in their palms 24/7, and our legal system is confronting the need to determine if certain forms of the digital realm have enough agency to be held criminally liable.  In fact, so ubiquitous has computing technology become to almost every facet of daily life that we have had to invent terminology to reference those of us born prior to its eruption (digital immigrants) and those born afterward (digital natives).

I bring all this up—and use the term “eruption” deliberately—because as I was enjoying an adult beverage with a friend of mine recently, I had one of those insights that frequently trigger my next round of writing, namely the eerie parallels between when laptop computers erupted upon the educational landscape and the current explosion of AI in that same landscape.  In both instances, the change came rapidly, even abruptly; there was little forethought given, with the positivity of the change assumed; and the unintended consequences for the brain produced significant disruptions to the learning process.  In other words, those of us in education found ourselves in reactive rather than proactive mode.

Which admittedly fits with our national character.  We have a long history in America of chasing the horse after it has left the proverbial barn (including our entry into nearly every war we have ever participated in), and our libertarian tendencies have made even clearly rational and obvious regulatory policies happen only after enormous numbers of people have died or been injured (think seat-belt laws and bike helmets).  Granted, some things we have no choice but to react to rather than to anticipate (the scientific field of chemistry was not advanced enough at the time to grasp the impact of the industrial revolution on the world’s climate).  However, we Americans have a bad habit of taking such laisse-faire to extremes, and our employment of technology in the classroom has been no exception.

Yet what if we resisted our cultural tendencies and actually started deliberately planning what we wanted to see happen with the latest technological revolution? What if we asked the “should” question even if our anticipated answer was already a default “yes?” There is in education a concept known as “backward planning,” and its essence is that only if we start with the educational target fully fleshed out and predetermined can we figure out all the intermediate steps that will lead a student successfully from novice to expert.  By analogy, if my goal was to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro, I should first ask what will I need to navigate the final alpine zone to reach the summit. Oxygen tanks? A certain number of days of acclimation? Then to reach those alpine altitudes, what will I need to navigate the temperate region of the mountain? Sleeping bags? Rain gear? Hence, as I descend backwards down the mountain in my mind, I plan for all that I will need to start my ascent at the bottom and achieve my goal.  If I simply traveled to the base of Kilimanjaro and began hiking, it is highly unlikely that I would ever see its peak.

Too often in education, though, it is this latter approach that frequently dominates much of the teaching that occurs in schools, and nowhere is this truer than when it comes to the employment of technology in the classroom.  I remember well the introduction of one-to-one laptop programs where each student now had their own personal device, and the question asked was not “what are our educational targets?” but rather, “how can we use these computers in as many ways as possible to justify their expense?” Some of us rebelled and kept planning backwards anyway, employing the new tool only in ways that helped us reach our educational goals.  But not everyone did, and the learning suffered accordingly.

Of course, now the new tech-in-town is AI, and again, the response has been “what do we do with this?” rather than “here’s what we seek to achieve; how can this aid us in doing that?” Granted, most of us in schools would state that education’s target is empathetic critical thinkers who can communicate and collaborate effectively, and AI would appear to actively inhibit anyone developing any of these traits.  But my point is that if you don’t take the right approach to asking the questions in the first place, we’ll never know.  Perhaps—in the same way that laptops made libraries of knowledge accessible anywhere 24/7 (an advantage to any learning environment or educational goal)—there may be a role for AI in achieving education’s purpose.  But we won’t know one way or the other without examining its use through the lens of backward planning.

A theme some colleagues and I intended to explore this summer; so I’ll keep you posted.

Coda

As a sidebar, I think it worthy to note that right now, the latest reactionary approach to technology in schools is an openly antagonistic one.  The mounting evidence available about the negative impact of all manner of screens to the learning process has produced a nearly universal cry to ban cellphones, smart watches, tablets…the list of digital “outlaws” grows daily. 

But as sympathetic as any of my regular readers knows that I want to be to this trend, the current process is no less reactive than the original introduction of all those screens into classrooms in the first place, and there are already potential problematic consequences.  Many of our children with certain disabilities actually need laptops, etc. in order to learn at all, let alone successfully. Hence, our current rush to throw out all this technological bathwater threatens to take some people’s literal babies with it. 

Yet, that leaves me pondering the fact that both the barndoor-horse and the baby-bathwater allegories are classical, uniquely American idioms about our reactive cultural tendencies.  So apparently—to paraphrase the Apostle Paul—we can see rather clearly in the mirror after all; we are just either unable or unwilling to fix what we see. 

Maybe we should map out a plan for that. Or we can keep doing this, broadcast the morning I had scheduled this essay for posting: Teacher Poll on AI in Schools.

References

Bechard, D.E. (Feb., 2026) AI Coding a Dyslexia Tutor.  Scientific American. P. 22.

Mehta, J. (June 4, 2026) Screens Are Leaving Schools Fast, Though Some Students With Disabilities Rely on Them.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5812850/screens-schools-students-with-disabilities.