Education for Persons

by Dr. Andrew Seeley, President and Co-Founder of the Boethius Institute

I returned on Sunday from Notre Dame after this year’s De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture conference. 1100 people participated, including most of the 300+ Sorin Fellows, graduate and undergraduate students at Notre Dame who “are supported by the de Nicola Center and provided opportunities to encounter role models and befriend mentors who exhibit virtues of integral formation, consider enduring and contemporary issues through the lens of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition, nourish their interior life and appreciation for the spiritual heritage of the Catholic Church, and discern and cultivate their gifts and talents through grant funding and internships.” I hope to learn more from their experience as we continue to develop our own Fellowship.

The conference theme, “Dust of the Earth: On Persons,” was addressed from many different perspectives by papers ranging from very good to excellent. I came away almost overwhelmed by how much learning and discovery is going on at this moment in history, and by the many attempts at making sense of it all coming from different philosophical standpoints: artificial intelligence, end of life determinations, genetic manipulation, issues of immigration and racism. It really drove home the need for educating the next generation so that they can draw on wisdom old and new to guide themselves and their communities in what looks to be an exciting but very dangerous time. In fact, that time is here, so we can’t simply wait for them to come of age; we must educate ourselves for wisdom now.

As usual with education that prioritizes career preparation over lasting human formation, our society’s current efforts in education are woefully behind the real current and future needs of our young. In the 70’s, college prep high  schoolers learned to punch holes in cards in a language called Fortran; mutatis mutandis, little has changed. This came home to me recently when our local paper reported on a STEM internship program that sent teachers to work at local companies for six weeks in the summer so that they could learn how to bring real world business applications into their classrooms. One teacher learned how growing manufacturing companies need to produce standard operating procedure manuals for their new employees. “He brought his SOP learning back to class and had his students write standard operating procedures for the woodworking tools in his class. This gives students a skill they can bring to the workplace, positioning them as a problem-solver.” But I am sure that ChatGPTs are already making such work and such training obsolete. Instead of preparing them for future careers, it forms them in ways of thinking that they will have to unlearn if they are to flourish.

Another teacher was struck “by the ability of the staff at the hatchery to problem solve and work together cooperatively. What I will take away from this experience and use in the classroom is presenting students with problems that need to be solved.” This seems more promising in terms of offering life-long employment benefits to students. When I asked Walter Scheirer, one of the impressive conference presenters on AI, what he thought education should focus on given the changes to the economic world that AI will bring, he said, “Decision-making.”

Helping our students to learn to communicate with one another and with the superabundant wealth of information and analysis available through AI so as to make good decisions might be a laudable goal; it definitely is if we think of it in terms of their whole human life, and not simply their economic life. But this means radically changing how we understand the purpose of education. I found this statement from our local paper almost chilling in its blunt statement of the current inhuman goal:

The education community has applied the terms “work-based learning,” “project-based learning,” and “real-world learning,” to problem-solving activities in the classroom. It makes sense: schools are tasked with teaching students to be assets to organizations, government, business and industry by the time they graduate.

Doesn’t this make teachers into “just another brick in the wall”?