By Sarah K. Turney
Director of Communications & Marketing
There is a moment in Pixar’s WALL-E that feels much less like science fiction today than it did when the film appeared in 2008. In the movie, humanity has become almost completely dependent on machines. Technology transports people, entertains them and feeds them, mediating all their experiences of the world. Convenience has progressed so far that people have gradually surrendered something far more important than physical effort: agency. The machines have not exactly conquered humanity. Humanity has simply allowed machines to do more and more on its behalf.
That distinction is especially poignant when considering how artificial intelligence has become so ubiquitous, even filtering down to the educational process. AI can write an essay, summarize a chapter, formulate an argument and answer a question in seconds for any student. It is an extraordinary tool. But when a tool can perform so much of the mental work involved in learning, an important question emerges: What intellectual muscles will children have developed before they begin outsourcing portions of their thinking to it?
That question becomes more pressing in light of emerging research into how AI use may affect developing minds.
When the Shortcut Bypasses the Learning
Early findings raise important questions about what researchers have coined “cognitive stunting.” The L.A. Times recently reported how young children using ChatGPT were observed using less engagement in brain regions associated with attention and information processing compared with adults performing similar tasks. Similar research involving high school students also found that students using ChatGPT did well on practice questions but performed worse than peers once the AI tool was removed. While the research is early, these studies suggest that dependence on AI during important developmental years might bypass some of the difficult mental work through which children learn to reason independently.
The distinction is important: Learning requires effort. Children retrieve information, struggle to find words, organize ideas, recognize patterns, make mistakes and reconsider their conclusions. What can look like inefficiency may actually be intellectual development taking place.
The danger, then, is not simply that AI can think. It is that a developing child can arrive at the product of thinking without sufficiently practicing the process that produces a thinker.
First Develop the Thinker
For parents and educators, the question is not whether children should someday use artificial intelligence. That is inevitable. The more immediate question considers what capacities a child should develop before a machine begins performing those functions for him.
We teach children math concepts before allowing them to use a calculator because producing an answer is not the same thing as truly understanding mathematics. AI extends that concern into abilities that are even more closely connected with intellectual formation: writing, reasoning, researching, synthesizing and forming an argument.
A student must learn how to ask a good question before delegating answers to a machine. They need to work through weighing evidence, making connections, and struggle toward clarity before receiving a tidy response seconds after typing a prompt.
The proper order of educating matters: First develop the thinker. Then teach the thinker to use the tool.
A Handcrafted Countermovement
There is an interesting historical parallel. Industrialization transformed society by enabling goods to be manufactured faster, more cheaply and at scales traditional craftsmen could never produce. Yet industrialization also prompted counter-cultural movements that renewed appreciation for craftsmanship and the human hand.
Perhaps our world, and specifically education, is approaching its own version of that moment. AI offers an unprecedented ability to “produce” intellectual products quickly and efficiently. In contrast,
“handcrafted” learning deliberately slows that process down. This is critical not because paper is inherently better or technology inherently harmful, but because it is the slowed down process of learning that forms the person.
When a child encounters an idea and has to decide what it means, determine what matters, connect it to something previously learned and then articulate it in his own words, the finished paragraph is almost beside the point. The process required to produce it is doing something within the student. The “inefficiency” is partly the point.
The Work that Builds a Thinker
This is where StoneBridge School’s bedrock educational approach proves to be remarkably counter-cultural, serving as an anchor to the student’s intellectual development. Students engage in learning through four steps: research, reason, relate and record, specifically championed in the Notebook Method. They are producers in the learning process, building a daily record of what they are studying rather than simply receiving information.
These habits protect something increasingly valuable in childhood: time for the developing mind to do its own work. They are even more critical to moving students beyond accumulating information toward recognizing truth, discerning principles and applying what they have learned. The point again is not to indulge in a nostalgic use of pencils and paper. It is to recognize what happens when we remove every obstacle between a child and an answer.
Obstacles are where growth occurs. Removing them deprives the child from these opportunities. The result may be adults who lack real critical thinking skills, but more importantly who have not had their character formed through the real challenge of arriving at their own conclusions. Ultimately, the resulting intellectual vacuum doesn’t pose the greatest danger; it is the moral vacuum that comes in its wake.
Protecting the Formative Years
Parents play a critical role in navigating AI use in their child’s education. Children need adults willing to protect opportunities for genuine intellectual struggle. We can continue asking deeper questions:
- What do you think?
- How did you reach that conclusion?
- Why do you believe it?
- What principle is at work?
- What connections do you see?
- Can you explain it in your own words?
The answers may take longer to arrive at; the struggle will be real and sometimes painstaking. But it is in this space where learning happens. A student who has researched an idea, reasoned through it and expressed it for himself can rightly recognize the thought as something he or she understands. His notebook becomes the visible evidence of a mind developing over time. And while intellectual ownership is the fruit of that struggle, the goal ultimately is the formation of the child’s mind and character.
Equipped to Think Before They Prompt
Parents do not need to prepare children for a world without artificial intelligence. Full disclosure, this article was drafted with the assistance of AI tools. It’s ubiquitous use in the workforce today is unavoidable. But it is human agency that is responsible for putting the boundaries on the tools we create. Because of that, parents should prepare children who can enter an AI world with their human faculties developed to their fullest potential. At StoneBridge, that means helping each child reach the fullest expression of their value in Christ. It means protecting the years in which children learn to concentrate, remember, question, reason, write, create and persevere when an answer does not come easily.
AI may eventually help students accomplish certain tasks more efficiently. But efficiency is valuable only when we have considered what we are making more efficient. Perhaps that is one of the most prescient lessons from WALL-E. The problem was never simply that the machines could do so much. It was that human beings had stopped doing enough for themselves. They had surrendered their agency to the machines.
Parents and educators have the responsibility to prepare children to become thoughtful human beings so they do not become slaves to the tools we create. Helping a child do the difficult work themselves builds the thinker first–perhaps even one handwritten page at a time.
