The debate is too narrow

Everyone is asking how students keep learning to think once machines can think. Fair question, wrong frame: it assumes intelligence is all college is for.

“in a world where machines can think, how do we make sure students still learn to think?”

Information or formation

What AI cannot copy is curiosity, the search for meaning, and inner growth. Those are not extras bolted onto a degree, they are the point of one.

“These aren't extracurriculars, they're a core part of what true education is about.”

Education means to nourish

The Latin educare means to nourish and bring out. Medieval universities aimed at forming the whole person, what Aquinas called capax universi, before the mission got trimmed down.

Curiosity is dying young

Preschoolers ask around 100 questions a day. That rate falls off as they age and roughly vanishes by middle school, right when school should be feeding it.

“all men by nature desire to know”

The real risk of a prompt

The danger is not just outsourcing answers, it is outsourcing the questions. Sitting with mystery gets waved away, and the appetite for wonder goes with it.

“Offloading cognition can lead to offloading the appetite for wonder.”

Grade the questions

Build a first-year seminar entirely around inquiry and grade students on the questions they pose, not the answers they produce.

Follow one question for four years

Students pick a big open question on arrival, why suffering exists, what beauty is, and chase it through science, art, and literature. The output is how the question changed them.

A capstone of the self

Stanford's William Damon found over half of students come seeking purpose, and few schools help. Reframe career advising around calling, and let seniors write an examined-life portfolio.

“To educate has always been about nourishing the whole person, not just the intellect.”