Last year, a photograph of one of our students appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald for an article featuring Hartford’s approach to technology.
The image was a student simply sitting in a classroom, smiling, and working in an exercise book.
Such a scene, entirely ordinary for decades, had become symbolic of a growing response to the screen-saturated environment in which many young people are now expected to learn.
The image did not signify how groundbreaking our school was, rather it revealed how dramatically the educational landscape had shifted in such a short period of time.
With artificial intelligence, students can now generate persuasive essays, summarise entire novels, answer comprehension questions, and create sophisticated pieces of work instantly.
Many schools are scrambling to keep pace.
Meanwhile schools are faced with immense pressure to prepare students for a digital future.
They are rushing to ensure students become familiar with AI technologies, to prepare “work-ready,” graduates, who are AI familiar.
Training their students with the skills needed to create the most effective prompts to generate the desired outputs. Trying to best prepare their students on how to use AI.
Yet Pope Leo XIV, in Magnifica Humanitas, invites us to ask a deeper set of questions than simply how best to use AI.
What human qualities need to be cultivated in an age of artificial intelligence? What kind of people will our students become while using it? And what role should schools play in that formation?
Pope Leo XIV writes that “every technology shapes those who use it,” and educators are faced with the question; if AI increasingly does the intellectual heavy lifting, which mental muscles are no longer being exercised, and will consequentially atrophy?
Parents and teachers need to therefore think carefully before allowing powerful technologies to assume increasing portions of the intellectual work that has traditionally belonged to the student.
This is critical because schools have students during a crucial and finite period of their cognitive development.
These adolescent years represent one of the most important windows for intellectual formation, rivalled perhaps only by early childhood.
Too often we equate the production of work as the outcome of education.
We focus on the essay, the worksheet, the assessment task, or the examination. And this focus on the output makes a machine solution tempting.
But these are not the real outputs of education. School is a lot less like a factory, and much more like a gym for the mind.
The essay, the worksheet, and the assessment task are simply the weights moving up and down, the treadmill spinning around.
The real desired outcome is the formation of habits of mind developed through sustained effort, attention, struggle, and discovery.
You cannot replace the struggle of learning any more than you can replace putting time into doing exercise at the gym.
As Pope Leo reminds us through Plato, the deepest and most important things “are learned only after much time and effort.”
Our response as parents, and teachers needs to be a human one. Creating environments that allow students to ‘ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.’
As Pope Leo XIV warns that “we risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” we must ask ourselves if we have provided the environment to cultivate curiosity and wonder. To light the fire rather than fill the bucket.
Hartford’s decision to have minimal technology in our classrooms coupled with a Liberal Arts education, is a deliberate, prudent, and courageous step to create the environment needed for our students to flourish.
The great educational tradition from Socrates to Augustine has always understood that wisdom begins with wonder.
The search for truth starts with the recognition that there is more to know.
If technology provides answers so quickly and so efficiently that students cease asking questions, then we have lost something essential.
In a world increasingly filled with misinformation, algorithmic persuasion, and AI-generated content, critical thinking becomes increasingly important, not less.
Pope Leo writes that “schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”
What a beautiful vision of education, one I hope we can collectively achieve.
Ian Mejia is the Principal of Hartford College in Daceyville.
