“Use it wisely”: Traditional Christian schools struggle with AI integration

“Use it wisely”: Traditional Christian schools struggle with AI integration

Classic Christian schools, whose learning is based on traditions of the last 2,000 years, are facing a new question: How should they deal with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)?

David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, is trying to help his 550 member institutions answer that question.

“My concern is that we are not thinking, we are just reacting,” he told The Lion. Goodwin is also writing an essay on the topic to frame the topic and solicit input from members.

Classical Christian education trains students to learn, summarize, and evaluate topics through materials such as classical literature and related works while forming character and a Christian worldview. The approach has proven quite successful since its renewal in the United States around 1980.

One motivation for their resurgence was the belief that traditional Christian schools offered students protection from the world, Goodwin says.

“The goal of classical Christian education was to take nothing off the table,” he says. “In other words, don’t protect children, but teach them to see all things in the context of Christ and His Kingdom.

“So if we said about AI, ‘This is the one thing you don’t want to mess with,’ are we in the camp of ‘We’re going to protect you because it’s a scary thing?’ “Well, even though it’s a scary thing, it fits the purpose of our operation, which is to train students to set all their minds on Christ, and so we want to model that.”

Many schools were caught off guard two or three years ago, Goodwin says, when students began using AI to write important work such as theses. Because most didn’t have a specific AI policy, students technically didn’t break the rules even if they didn’t match the intent of the task.

“Now most schools have a rule that you can’t use AI to write any part of your work,” says Goodwin. The technology even “tells itself” as AI can determine the probability that a paper was written by machine.

Goodwin says there are legitimate uses for the technology, but they depend on the objective of the mission. If the lesson is about formatting a works cited page, let students do the work. However, if they have already mastered this skill, using AI can speed up the process.

“I think it has to depend a lot on what you’re asking the student to do,” he says. “I think what’s happening out there is that people are scared to death of AI right now because [it’s] so much more powerful than anything we can imagine.”

Goodwin, who worked for tech giant Hewlett-Packard for 15 years before making his way into education, sees AI as a tool not unlike a spell checker or grammar software.

“I’m old enough to remember people criticizing word processors for checking spelling in 1980, when I was writing papers for college, and there are people [today] who criticize the use of Grammarly. AI is in some ways just a very sophisticated form of one of these types of technologies.”

Traditional Christian schools are already limiting the use of technology, generally eliminating videos and screens in the elementary years and introducing laptops in middle and high school so students can do research and write papers.

“The basic idea is that screen time is bad for kids and so we need to limit it,” says Goodwin, “but we’re not going to force them to use a manual typewriter, so you have to keep it sensible.”

Classical schools aim to educate students who are full of virtue and wisdom and can reason from a Christian perspective. This approach, sometimes called “telos,” or purpose-driven, guides schools to do more than just ensure their students are proficient in reading and math.

Because the emphasis is on the search for truth and beauty, a variety of subjects are studied so that students can learn the difference between what is good and what is not. This could provide traditional schools with a framework for dealing with AI.

Kolby Atchison, in his article “Classical Education and the Rise of AI,” argues that the values ​​gained through classical education will distinguish humans from artificial intelligence, “not about the “To outwit AI, but to collaborate with it and manage it wisely.”

“My prediction is that AI will become more and more a part of normal life, just as previous technological innovations such as the calculator and the microwave have,” he writes. “The way forward is not the path of the idiot who rejects the use of technology at all, but rather to train students to use it wisely, paying particular attention to ensuring that they do not interfere with the tasks, activities, and replacing experiences that students themselves must undergo in order to cope with “growing up as virtuous men and women.”

Goodwin agrees that banning AI entirely would be a “disservice” because “other people are using it in college.” He believes in preparing students now to use it well so that they don’t become excluded, left behind, or completely overwhelmed.

“It’s an old saying that the first kid to get into sexual trouble in college is often the one who’s been protected their whole life,” Goodwin says. “You want to prepare your students to use an AI properly, not to write their papers, but to support them in their research. We should be sensible in our use of AIs.”

Goodwin acknowledges that there are others in his movement who think differently. Some want to limit training exclusively to the classical works that made them famous. Nevertheless, technology continues to develop.

“The other day I was working on training materials with one of our younger employees here and pulled an index of the great books of the Western world off the shelf. “It’s a 64-volume set,” he says. “I started looking through it and he stopped me and said, ‘I have this on my computer.’

“I didn’t know that something like this existed, that it had been digitized. He used the exact same resource, but it saved time because he could just click on the links instead of looking for the page numbers.”

“Classic” doesn’t just have to mean “old,” says Goodwin.

“Classical educators may agree that we like old things, but if there are better ways to use technology to use and learn from the old sources, we definitely should.”