As educators wrestle with the impacts of AI in the classroom, Father Dave welcomes back friend of the show Brett Salkeld to discuss what Pope Leo says to teachers in his latest encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Brett is the archdiocesan theologian for the Archdiocese of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada and the author of “Educating for Eternity: A Teacher’s Companion for Making Every Class Catholic.”
Father Dave begins, “As an educator, have you already started to see how AI is impacting education in general? Certainly, we hear a lot of news stories about the impacts at the college level because of [students writing papers with AI].”
Brett responds, “It’s been the number one topic…what students are doing with assignments and [teachers needing to] reconfigure assignments is a big thing. But other big things are like how should teachers be using this? Can teachers use it to come up with lesson plan ideas, come up with rubrics, or [grade papers] for you?”
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He continues, “There’s a great joke: I’ll get AI to come up with an assignment. I’ll give it to the student, and the student will get AI to do the assignment. They’ll give it to me, and I’ll get AI to [grade] the assignment. So why don’t we all just go to the beach? Like, what are we doing?”
“If AI can write essays better than we can, then are we here to write essays? Is that why we were going to school? Or by writing the essay, were we producing people who haved written essays,” Brett continues. “People who have written essays have gone through a certain formative experience and they’ve become someone. Education is formation; It’s about becoming who God is calling us to be.”
Father Dave adds, “Pope Leo says in the encyclical, ‘Education is a long journey requiring patience, and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances’ (No. 140). Since I’m sure people are thinking, ‘Okay, with all this AI stuff, can we get this done quicker?’”
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“Reducing education to information transfer is totally dehumanizing,” Brett says, and highlights a paragraph from Magnifica Humanitas that stood out to him. “In Number 146, Pope Leo says, ‘Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection, and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.’”
Brett reflects, “We can have more data than we know what to do with, but we’re long past the stage where lack of data was the thing that was impeding us. We have the opposite problem; We have so much data, but we don’t have the practice. We don’t have the space, the discipline, or the formation to organize the data into meaning.”
“AI can answer all kinds of technical questions, and it can perform all kinds of technical tasks,” he says. “[But] It cannot give us meaning, and an education that can’t do that is a waste of everybody’s time.”
