In graduate school, up-and-coming academics can dream about conducting interviews and focus groups in a foreign language in some hot and far-away locale. It does not always work out this way. You go where the information can be found. In confronting the elemental challenge of integrating classical education with artificial intelligence (AI), I decided to conduct interviews with AI chatbots to see if there was a consensus on how to integrate classical education and Christian humanism with the new technology. I asked Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and X’s Grok for their feedback on how to do this very thing. The results were surprising. Not only did I discover a chatbot consensus, but I was also told that good teaching, alongside AI, needs to prioritize face-to-face dialogue and argument, as well as the communication of critical thinking through handwriting and speaking. As it turns out, humanity’s silicon-based assistants view effective teaching in the future as similar to that of the past.
Academicians love to promote the implications of their studies, and those often make the headlines. Rarely do people verify the quality of a study’s data, design, or replicability. I asked this exact question:
I’m a professor and want to integrate AI into teaching in my college pedagogy. I teach from a classical educational vantage point, and want to teach from a Christian humanistic point of view. I also want to ensure my students learn critical thinking and can no longer trust them to write papers due to them outsourcing the work to AI. How can I systematically teach and assess them with this new technology without losing quality.
Each of the three AIs I interviewed gave the same three themes: emphasizing oral communication and debate, detailed handwritten work and the process of critical thinking, and emphasizing primary texts while criticizing AI output.
Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, which strives for ethics and safety, suggested that professors interested in classical teaching place handwritten work, oral examinations, and classroom reading, discussion, and debate at the center of coursework. To instill critical thinking, it suggested placing process over product. OpenAI’s better-known and somewhat more sociopathic predecessor, ChatGPT, stressed incorporating in-class discussion of classical Western texts, the same oral debates and discussions, but with the idea that students incorporate individualized ideas of faith into their work to foster character development. Elon Musk’s Grok offered more intense suggestions, such as handwritten journals, integrating the Trivium into course curricula, and engaging in active debate with AI models alongside active problem-solving with fellow students.
These responses offer vivid glimpses into a future in which classical education cannot only be reinvigorated but incorporated into teaching humanities and social science in an age that threatens to push human beings out of the workplace and into obsolescence. The AI models made clear that students need to use technology as a tool while also learning to lean into their humanity. Writing by hand is slow but integral to learning due to its neurological benefits and ability to reinforce cognitive development. Currently, students who are college-aged and younger have an increasingly difficult time speaking on the phone or face-to-face. What AI suggests would help mitigate this problem while also integrating the development of critical thinking and reasoning alongside the pathos and emotion incumbent in human interaction.
Noting the importance of economic relevance to education, I, of course, asked the chatbots a follow-up question: “Would a goal and end-result of these approaches be to cultivate interpersonal communication? Self-awareness? Or an understanding of human nature? Is this still relevant in the economy of tomorrow?” Claude’s answer was surprisingly humanistic and optimistic. Claude noted that the skills described above are not only resistant to automation but that this new approach to education forces students to confront their own human nature and cultivate the understanding, empathy, and watchfulness to guard against its excesses and cultivate what is good about it. Claude outright stated to me that:
The irony is that as AI becomes more prevalent, education that develops these deeper human capacities becomes not obsolete but rather more precious. A Christian humanistic approach that embraces new technologies while remaining rooted in timeless wisdom offers students something more valuable than technical training alone: the ability to remain fully human in a rapidly changing world.
Claude not only vindicated classical education but also outlined a path forward for what comes next for a profession currently in full-blown crisis and meltdown due to falling enrollment, identity politics, hyper-politicization, and economic irrelevance. Something new is needed; fortunately, AI has the potential to be the key to improving higher education.
A civilization cannot survive without the ability to cultivate high levels of learning and self-awareness. At the same time, neither education nor civilization can function without a soul. Classical education operates on the assumption that the soul is not only flawed and universal but priceless and something to be cultivated over a lifetime. Human beings do not live by analytics alone but by developing their reasoning alongside the cultivation of humility, empathy, and the virtues needed for self-governance and citizenship.
When integrated correctly, AI sees itself working well in rebuilding classical education for the future.
Cover designed by Jared Gould, featuring a screenshot of the ChatGPT prompt “What’s your take on classical education,” with background design by nadl2022 on Adobe (Asset ID#: 91081221).
