By Leigh Bortins Without AI
In Part One, I described my credentials in pursuing homeschooling with humans, defined AI, and asked many questions beyond the common discussion on AI’s impact on plagiarism and student integrity. I spent over 80 hours researching, thinking, speaking, and writing before I completed part one.
In Part Two, I let AI do the work as I improved my engineered prompts (better questions). Part Two required 10 minutes to complete the final draft due to a couple of weak prompts on my part. Two things to notice –
- You can tell Part Two is not my writing and my voice
- AI could only write Part Two because the CC team has spent 30 years thinking and writing copiously about classical, Christian education and posting information to be scrapped by AI online. AI requires accurate, authorized, not average aggregated information to explain things well.
In this Part Three post, I want to address what I call the “Monday” problem. What do we actually do with AI, our families, and all this philosophy on Monday morning?
AI and Children: Let Them Grow Strong First
I believe there is no reason for children in Foundations, Essentials, or Challenge A to use AI or digital tools for anything. Let your children play with God’s creation and simple toys. If you are vigilant in the early years, your children will be strong enough to occasionally use digital tools at home for Challenge B assignments and beyond.
Is AI Diminishing Our Ability to Think?
No one needs to use AI while learning how to think. There have been many American children born before the advent of the radio and compulsory education who were proficient readers, meaning they could read, analyze, and synthesize information. This is also called thinking.
The decline in literacy, and hence, thinking, has occurred since the age of electronic entertainment allowed us, in the words of Neil Postman, to “amuse ourselves to death.” As with any digital technology – calculators, word processors, image generators – brainwaves are diminished when AI is used compared to when people think for themselves.
Early Education and Digital Delay
The wisdom of homeschooling parents since the 1980s is that children are naturally attentive when they never watch TV, play video games, or use laptops. Electronic overstimulation is damaging to cognitive skills. The best advice is to delay using any digital device until the student is a very strong thinker and doesn’t actually need the tool. Use AI when you don’t really need to use AI. Then it will be a powerful verifier of what you already estimate – much like a calculator does now.
AI and Education: Why CC Families Thrive
Families join CC for the community – to learn from one another. To become better at knowing God and making Him known. We can succeed by only using the same resources as His disciples – people who think and pray together.
CC families have the reputation of learning how to think together. We plan to continue cultivating the reputation that we help one another strengthen our weaknesses and amplify our strengths.
The world of employment focuses only on strengthening strengths, which is economically efficient. The world of academics focuses on strengthening weaknesses, which is called education. AI used inappropriately weakens our weaknesses. If you love someone, you will work to strengthen their weaknesses.
CC Tutors and the Timeless Strength of Classical Education
CC Tutors have no reason to bring AI into our seminars. They already provide the best AI training possible for children because classical education is truly timeless and timely.
During the digital age, many parents asked us to include computer coding in the curriculum. We have been able to respond with, “We do. We study the fundamentals of language together so your children may learn any language. Programming languages are much simpler to learn than the Latin studied in Challenge or your mother tongue in Essentials.”
Rule-Based and Behavior-Based Language: A Classical Perspective
All humans learn to process words through behavior-based language. You cannot help but speak like the people around you. You say what they say. We all do it. Accents, slang, jargon, cliches – no one needs to be literate to speak like those around them. Classicalists go one step farther – recovering the damage done by modern education – we also teach rule-based language.
Historically, young children went to Grammar Schools (not Elementary Schools) to learn the rules of language, called grammar. In Essentials, CC parents teach the parts of speech, the word lists of the parts, the sentence patterns, the structures of word endings, paragraphs, essays, and poetry, as well as stylistic techniques that improve our ability to use both behavior-based and rule-based language.
Behavior-based language is local and specific. Rule-based language is universal and integrated.
Learn more about the difference between Classical vs Modern Education
How AI Mimics Human Language
Digital language models and now AI large language models can process words because of the rules of grammar, as well as algorithms that analyze the expected behavior of words based on statistics. Complete this phrase, “Fish and …” You most likely said ‘chips’ not cucumbers. AI algorithms do the same thing – they use the most probable phrases.
Computers only know off and on. Humans have figured out how to use off and on, represented by zeros and ones, with math to mimic language skills through plastic, wires, silicon, and rare earth metals.
By practicing presentations and forensics from the age of 4 (“Any questions?”) to the age of 18 (“Should Hamlet be put on trial and for what crime?”) with Classical Conversations, you have been expanding your family’s behavior-based language abilities beyond what most families would even recognize as possible.
Classically Prepared AI in Education
By studying Latin, logic, and the essentials of language, as well as math words, notations, laws, calculations, and algorithms, your family has at least a dozen years of rule-based and behavior-based language practice. Without us knowing it, the Lord prepared the classically educated Body of Christ to use AI (and any technical advancement) with knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.
A New Responsibility for Parents
But adults have a new responsibility to learn with the children they love. All that work training your children to think—in their heads, with other humans, in seminars, at the family table, on paper—can be undone if you are not vigilant.
It’s your love for your children and your great desire for them to love God with their whole hearts, minds, and souls that will motivate you to be vigilant. The new responsibility is to teach your children to use digital technologies sparingly.
Be Vigilant: Guarding Thought and Virtue
Vigilance will be easier if you continue to live among people who support your passion for loving the Lord with your whole heart, mind, and soul. Parents, with the Body of Christ, serve as gatekeepers and champions of virtue.
Moms and Dads model curiosity, set boundaries, and prayerfully evaluate their child’s ability, not an AI’s ability, to elevate “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report.” (Phil. 4:8).
Anything less than vigilance will lead to sloth induced by digital convenience.
A Warning from Postman and Huxley
Listen to Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985. “What Orwell (1984) feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley (Brave New World) feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
Literacy, Thought, and the Think-Nots
I believe we can’t stop the decline in literacy unless we practice thinking without AI first. You must develop your human intellectual potential, or like Huxley feared, AI will give us so much information that we will be reduced to passivity (Why work?) and egoism (I don’t need to know that). Much of mankind has already fallen prey to Postman’s warnings.
From Haves to Think-Nots
During the Industrial Era, the idea of “the haves and have-nots” became prevalent. Before that, everyone was materially poor and didn’t know it. Men with vision used the new tools of industry to make lives better for all of us, but the result was to widen both the wealth and the knowledge gaps.
During the Digital Era, what I call the era of “the maths and the math-nots,” those who embraced digital tools developed engineered products, services, and support never dreamed of before. Even though all humans materially benefited, the wealth and knowledge gap widened again. After COVID, we entered the AI Era, what I call the era of “the thinks and the think-nots.”
If you know how to think well, deeply, and for sustained periods, AI is going to increase 100x your personal wealth and knowledge. But once again, the wealth and knowledge gap between the “thinks and the think-nots” will expand – a lot!
Listen to The Lesson History Teaches from The Everyday Educator podcast
AI: A Humbling Tool for Humans
CS Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, says, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument…” until science has abolished the need for mankind.
Technology may not be inherently good or evil, but it can be inherently dangerous. To use a chainsaw effectively, one must have strong muscles, good balance, eyes that work well, knowledge of the blade and the material being cut, and a certain confidence that comes from a lot of practice.
It is foolish to use a chainsaw prematurely or to show off. Even experts approach the tool with some caution. A chainsaw is only safe when it is not being used. AI is analogous to a chainsaw. Its use will damage the cognitively weak, but can be an amazing tool for the cognitively strong. Like a chainsaw, AI should be humbling to the user.
Modeling Good Habits: Parents First
Parents are the best model for good habits. Your habits will become your children’s habits. This means you need to be careful about your own use of technology. I suggest parents only use digital technology when children are not in the room. However, I do think you should learn how to use AI before your children do. Lead them into good digital habits and then watch them soar past your digital interests and capabilities.
Family Tech Practices: A Classical Approach to AI and Homeschool
You may have older children who are strong enough to wield AI; hence, your younger children may be drawn into the presence of AI. With you in control of devices, some AI can enhance your time learning together as a family. The following are just suggestions for using AI as a family.
- Draft a family tech charter that addresses data privacy, the dignity of human authorship, and Sabbath rest from screens.
- Discuss how your family archives and retrieves books, photos, music, and other artifacts.
- Look for examples to practice digital safety on phones, laptops, and other devices.
- Teach your children how to deal with boredom so they don’t beg for electronic devices.
- Use image recognition apps on walks to identify flora, fauna, stars, and planets.
- Record your family singing the timeline or practicing presentations and then ask AI for feedback.
- After handwriting a Foundations or Essentials assignment, practice typing it on a laptop, but bring the handwritten version to seminar.
- Pull down a book before doing a digital search.
- Ask AI a question with your child, then revise the question after reviewing the answer.
- Use AI to generate worksheets after solving a math problem manually.
- Turn hand-drawn art into digital creations together.
Please, protect your children’s sense of wonder at the things of God.
Read more Online Research Strategies: 7 Tips for Success
Faith, Family, and the Future of AI
The AI and education discussion is just beginning. But as Christian classicalists, we are prepared to ask and answer the best questions.
New homeschoolers ask a popular question: “What subjects should I teach?”
AI has not changed my response. “I don’t know!”
When teaching my sons, I emphasized the art of studying anything because I don’t know if my grandbabies, who my sons will teach, will be doctors, astronauts, missionaries, or plumbers. I don’t know if our sons will have to parent through peace, war, tyranny, or freedom. I don’t know if they will be rich or poor, have supportive wives or be widowed at an early age.
And you know who else doesn’t know these things? AI, the Department of Education, Classical Conversations, or even you!
But I can tell you who does. God, not the state, directs your family daily towards His purposes. And every evening, we repent of our failures, we sleep, and we rise from the dead, forgiven and knowing His mercies are new every morning. We know we will never complete our academic studies. Only Jesus could say, “It is finished.” The rest of us are just practicing until we hear the great, “Well done!”
Hope for the Future
In a world where a machine can rob your capacity to think, I still live in great hope. I am energized by the parents who teach their children:
- We live in a world with windows beyond this universe.
- We serve His purposes rather than our weaknesses.
- The family led by the father, led by The Father, is the foundation of all other institutions.
Thanks for raising children that know God and make Him known.
Read Leigh’s blogs in the AI series:
- Who’s Really Thinking? AI and the Future of Education- Part One
- AI Writing Tools vs. Human Creativity: Homeschooling with Humans- Part Two
Join Leigh’s conversation about AI at Judson College:
Written by:
