By Conor Ross
It is no secret the rise of AI is changing the world as we know it. Great improvements are expected to transform our jobs and everyday lives, but great upheaval is also expected with experts predicting the loss of 50 per cent of white-collar jobs in the next decade.
As a teacher who has been working in Christian and Catholic schools for the past five years, I have witnessed the massive changes AI has made to schools.
Assessable tasks like writing formulaic essays are seemingly compromised, now being accomplished in seconds by students using ChatGPT. But beyond academic shortcuts, AI is quietly reshaping how young people think, form beliefs, and connect with history, culture, and those around them.
These changes are also transforming the lives of children, who are increasingly enmeshed in the AI-powered algorithms they are exposed to on social media. Unfortunately, these changes have been largely detrimental.
Within this AI revolution, it appears Catholic schools will increasingly face the dangers of inauthentic academic development, moral confusion, weakened family ties, secular bias, and a loss of spiritual depth.
But this is not surprising; there have been many times where children have fallen through the cracks of idealism in times of revolution.
The Industrial Revolution led to great technological developments but also to the rise of crude utilitarian philosophies, to the collapse of families shoved into factories and packed city quarters, and to the famous child gangs depicted by Charles Dickens.
The French Revolution purported to advance the world politically but its efforts to replace the family with the state and ideologically reduce children to “citizens-in-training” was disastrous, leading again to violent gangs and widespread nihilism.
In our own times, we find our youth disconnected from their families, preyed on by toxic and fanatical ideologies centred on identity politics, forming youth gangs, and falling victim to vices.
And while we have not seen a widespread Dickensian impoverishment or the use of the guillotine by fanatics, our children do live with an impoverishment of meaning amongst a variety of rising fanatical ideologies.
In most modern schools we find loss of tradition, an unravelling moral foundation leading to misbehaviour, and the promotion of relativistic social and cultural pragmatism over the promotion of virtue and transcendent meaning.
The recent and unsuccessful attempts to redress the spiralling misbehaviour in schools have predominantly relied upon pragmatic psychology under the paradigm of “wellbeing.”
What the ideologues in our schools have failed to realise is that in the absence of objective morality and strong family units, forming a gang with friends is really far more fun and pragmatically oriented than celebrating a spiritually vacuous event like Harmony Day.
Thankfully we can turn to history for solutions as well. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, writers like Charles Dickens, William Blake, and the Brontë sisters used Gospel-inspired storytelling and poetry to draw attention to the spiritual starvation of modern children.
The church responded to the indignities of child workers inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s vision laid out in Rerum Novarum that argued against the exploitation of workers and for the rights of children to be educated rather than used for economic gain.
It was saints like John Vianney, Jean Baptiste De La Salle, and Madeleine Sophie Barat who brought moral formation and healed France’s trauma following the violence of the Revolution and the Terror that followed – not theorists or educationalists pouring more ideology onto the problem.
It is therefore the church’s role again to respond to our current revolution, to ensure that its schools are places of genuine formation and not conformation to economic needs or overcome by toxic ideologies.
In our age, it is appropriate that as teachers we should turn to challenging and dignifying classical writers like Dickens, Blake, the Brontës, or Dante. By this we could better centre the dignity of humankind in a renewed curriculum for our schools, turning away from texts pandering to contemporary cultural trends.
If AI has made mechanistic measures of education redundant, then the need for a truly human education is now all the more apparent. To this end, the church’s rich anthropology can lead the way.
Away from the feel-goodery of pragmatic psychology, our schools will need the assistance of rigorous theology and philosophy – just as the papacy of Pope Leo XIII provided to the world in the chaos following the Industrial Revolution. We are blessed our newest pope, who has also taken the name Leo, has indicated he too wishes to provide a salve to a world in upheaval.
For our children too, we must again aim for higher than shallow psychologies of wellbeing to the true mission of Catholic schools in forming saints, guided by the examples of teacher saints like St Jean-Baptiste De La Salle and St Don Bosco.
Unsurprisingly the greatest promoter of the dignity of childhood in the modern world has been a saint, St Nicholas.
It is equally unsurprising that this dignity has been celebrated on Christmas, the celebration of Our Lord becoming flesh and taking the form of a child.
However, we cannot forget the threat that hung over the incarnation in the form of King Herod, with his dreams of an artificial kingdom, a pale imitation of God’s Kingdom propped up by earthly power and machinations.
Neither can we forget the Imago Dei within our students nor the threat of an artificial kingdom that now lingers over them.
Conor Ross is a Melbourne-based secondary teacher. He has also written for Quadrant and The Spectator Australia.
