According to a recent article in The Atlantic, educators are stuck in a kind of sci-fi reality, between students using artificial intelligence to write their papers and artificial intelligence designed to catch students using artificial intelligence to write their papers. Every time a better tool allows teachers to sniff out cheating, a better tool comes along to evade it. 

Long gone are the glorified word processors designed to prevent misspelled words. At least then, students had to do the writing. If a teacher suspected plagiarism, it was possible to prove it. As AI has evolved, so have students’ options to cheat. With newer AI and ChatGPT, every contrived essay is unique, which makes it nearly impossible to prove it came from a computer rather than the student. 

Perhaps more disturbing, teachers are in on the artificial cheating action. Why grade dozens of papers at a time when AI can do it for you? If it weren’t true, it would be unbelievable: papers written by bots, graded by bots. It’s like programming a video game to play itself and then claiming the win. 

Still, this is only the latest expression of an ongoing crisis in modern education, a crisis aptly described by a Duke University student, quoted in Steve Garber’s masterful book The Fabric of Faithfulness: 

“We’ve got no idea of what it is that we want by the time somebody graduates. This so-called curriculum is a set of hoops that someone says students ought to jump through before graduation. No one seems to have asked, ‘how do people become good people?’” 

 The reason that so many students think of assignments as hoops to jump through to “get an education,” is because so many educators see it that way.  Education is seen as a product to be marketed and sold, rather than a means of ascertaining truth, pursuing goodness, and recognizing beauty. When teachers have lost their way, it’s difficult to blame students for losing the “why” of education in all of the “whats.” 

The great preacher DL Moody once said, “If a man is stealing nuts and bolts from a railway track, and, in order to change him, you send him to college, at the end of his education, he will steal the whole railway track.” Put another way, education without a why is doomed to fail. Education without a moral framework only makes people better at being bad. 

This is the central focus of “Men Without Chests,” the opening essay in one of C.S. Lewis’s most important books, The Abolition of Man. Lewis clearly saw that attempts to de-moralize education would not give us a world without vice, but a world without virtue: 

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. 

T.S. Eliot observed that any answer to the question ‘what is education for?’ assumed an answer to the question ‘what is man for.”  Put differently, to assume that education is about the acquisition of data and skills is to assume that kids are computers made of flesh. Here’s how Neil Postman put it:  

Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn’t teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. The curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “skills.”  In other words, a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills. 

Within a Christian worldview, education is for the acquisition of wisdom and the understanding of God. That’s why historically, wherever Christianity spread, schools followed. When learning is centered on the Bible, literacy has a purpose. When based on an understanding of human beings and our purpose in this world, learning is sacred. God made us to enjoy His creation with all our minds, not our computers, under the care of someone who knows His truth. 

If you are an educator, please check out the resources of Colson Educators, a program designed to form Christian educators in a Christian worldview. The job of Christian educators, Dr. John Stackhouse once said, is more than twice as hard. They must be Christians; they must be educators; and they must be Christian educators.  

It’s a high calling to a higher vision of education. 

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.