In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV presents education as a journey into the deep which can only happen thanks to patience and technological minimalism: “Education . . . is a long journey requiring patience, and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances. This is a fundamental issue because every technology shapes those who use it.”
The pope notes the danger of AI’s instant answer without the user’s really sitting with and unfolding the question, and he recommends the classroom as the place of shared discovery:
The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time. As Plato wrote, the deepest and most important things are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion with others, “striking upon” ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.
In light of these considerations, the pope encourages restraint in approaching AI in education: “We must learn, then, how to exercise restraint in the use of AI and to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine, from that subtle temptation which renders human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
In what follows, I want to unpack Pope Leo’s call for patience, the importance of questioning, and the centrality of thinking. What is the optimal education technology when it comes to thinking? I argue that the manuscript, thought out by hand, cannot be surpassed.
Making Editing Efficient
When the philosopher Edith Stein finished writing her dissertation in 1916, she had to spend many Sundays and evenings dictating it to her friends who were accomplished typists. The resulting massive work had to be divided into three volumes, boxed, and tied together to present to her advisor, the philosopher Edmund Husserl.
She sent the gift to him, but though he several times displayed the box to friends, he was slow to start working his way through it, since he was in the first semester of teaching at a new university and had his hands full.
In fact, when months later Stein herself traveled to Husserl’s Freiburg to schedule the defense, she discovered that her director had not even begun to read the carefully prepared typescript. Husserl’s wife, Malvine, intervened and got the director to dive into the dissertation, which took all his free time over break.
By all accounts, the review rewarded his effort. Stein defended with the highest honors and was promptly made his first assistant, a post later occupied by Martin Heidegger.
Were Stein writing her dissertation today, the situation would unfold differently. She would have typed it from start to finish on her laptop. All the harrowing work of editing and polishing would be done more or less automatically with no need of imposing on her friends’ free time. And, when she was ready, all she would have to do would be to send Husserl a PDF via email. Pressed for time, he might even have succumbed to Acrobat’s incessant suggestion that it automatically generate a summary of the lengthy text. Everything would be less cumbersome and more efficient.
What is true of a dissertation, the crowning achievement of academic work, is true of the term paper, the first step of academic work. In Stein’s day, it would have been written out by hand, edited with marginal notations, and then carefully typed out only after the thought had taken its final form. Today, of course, the term paper is written from start to finish on the computer’s ever-perfectible screen.
Note that the typewriter came about in order to ease the reading of the manuscript by the professor through the process of converting idiosyncratic script into the regular, familiar, and more legible characters of a typescript. The word processor came about to ease the production of the typescript, saving writers from the burden of retyping entire pages and granting the flexibility to cut and paste whole sections with ease.
In the era of AI, however, the automation of the production of the typescript now comes with the possibility to automate the whole process from start to finish. What formerly began with a manuscript slowly written by hand and culminated in a typescript carefully prepared for review can now be accomplished by generative AI. In effect, the typewriter can now write the manuscript.
The Perennial Terror of Writing and Today’s Temptation
Thinking is an often agonizing ordeal, full of false starts and mistaken hunches. Inspiration is often slow to come or simply not forthcoming.
Stein, for example, wrote of an earlier experience of academic writing:
Nothing I had accomplished so far had ever exacted such a heavy toll in mental effort. I believe that without personally having done such creative philosophical work a person cannot possibly imagine what it demanded of me. Moreover, I cannot recall that I experienced at that time any of the deep joy which later habitually accompanied my work once I had surmounted the painful, preliminary difficulties.
These difficulties were there with her as she sat hunched over her desk in her small rented room with nothing about her but some books and personal effects. She had to confront terror, helped only by the occasional encouragement of friends and professors: yes, you are making progress; yes, you can do this; yes, keep going. Persevere.
Today, when the white screen taunts us and haunts us, we divert ourselves, for the very same machines we use to “process words” or write out our thoughts in order to straighten them out also provide a world of easy and endless distraction.
I see the difference when I compare a student essay written on an in-class exam with an essay written outside of class. The exam essay is focused. Paragraphs support the thesis statement. It reads as though it was not cobbled together in fits and starts but written as a whole in one continuous thought process. The take-home typed essay is more legible, yes, but also often less intelligible than its handwritten counterpart.
Now let us plug generative AI into what was already a vexed writing situation. The student confronts the blank screen, its angst-inducing nothingness, the scold of the blinking cursor. Something difficult is being demanded. Terror arises. Distractions only stave off the inevitable. Friends do not encourage perseverance but instead counsel a novel solution. Do not bother yourself with contemplating and accommodating the demands imposed by Professor So and So. It is a waste of time. Have the machine effortlessly generate it. Everyone else is doing it.
The message is: suppress rather than surmount the stress. In this way, students turn in the passable work, mindlessly generated, and they are brought that much closer to graduation and the imagined bliss of the workforce.
We Educators Are Partially to Blame
How can we help our students resist the temptation? I have heard of many good suggestions. We can try locking down browsers. We can police their writing process through the track changes feature of some word processing programs. We can try devoting precious time to in-class writing. We can even build retro computer labs with streamlined word processors disconnected from the internet, circa 1995. But these activities, as useful as they are, do not work against an operative fundamental misunderstanding, which we need to confront head-on.
For, as we reflect on this temptation faced by every student every day, we might realize that part of the blame lies with us, the educators. In grading only the final product, we have given the impression that the assignment is about the production of a passable product. If that is what it is about, then AI generation, supervised by the student, appears less obviously problematic. It is still dishonest but not necessarily nonsensical.
Yet education is not about generating passable products. The process is more important than the work, the writing than the written, the thinking than the thought. The product is graded only as a sign or indicator of the process, and the process itself of the habit that generated it.
In this way, professors are not there to evaluate the thing wrought. That is secondary. Their primary function is to occasion and promote the thinking that wrought it.
Hence, we need to step back and recollect that the modern effort to produce a readable version of that thought, the typescript, must not be enacted in such a way that the thought itself disappears as well.
We have tried so hard for years to make the professor’s job of grading easier by converting all this messy handwriting into typed uniformity, but the result is that we are in danger of making the professor’s job pointless. Instead of provoking daring thought, we are on the verge of promoting mindless sophistry.
Optimizing Thinking Through Writing
Pope Leo XIV importantly notes, “Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used.” What can AI do for us, and what ought it not do for us? There were universities for centuries before there were printing presses and before there were typewriters and computers. But whatever technology is available, the aim is the same: to foment understanding for each person involved.
During a sojourn in Rome, I had the privilege of handling the Vatican’s original autograph manuscript of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles. As a young professor at the University of Paris in 1265, he wrote this first summa by inking dried and stretched sheepskins. In poring over these precious pages, I was heartened to see that even this consummate master, whose writing glows with a halcyon clarity, struck out whole paragraphs and wrote new ones in the margins. His thoughts did not flow uninterrupted in polished form but benefited from a process of trial and error, of risk and of revision. Only after this painstaking process did he pass it off to copyists to be mass-produced.
In any age, the aim of education is, above all, to foster habits of thinking and understanding. It is not the production of professional-looking work but the actual thinking that leads first to amateur work and then, progressively and painfully, to better and better outcomes. But the important thing is not the outcome but the real fruit of the process: the slowly fostered habit of understanding. It is not anti-technological or backward to use the optimal technical means available for a given application. But it is anti-educational or backward to use a technical means that dispenses with the very ends of the process.
Quills on velum were improvements over styluses working on wax. Pens were real improvements over quills, and today’s ballpoint over fountain pens. Paper was a marvelous innovation. But generative AI constitutes no improvement but instead a regression: its use in education is premised on a misunderstanding of the very aim of education.
Education is not about producing work to be graded. Education is instead a matter of creating challenging situations so that students will be induced to rise up out of contentment with their mediocre understanding to struggle afresh and win for themselves a renewed understanding of the subject in question.
Rediscovering the Joy of Writing
Today, students in panic look for shortcuts that are readily available; yet they need to be counseled to take heart and find courage, for precisely there in the difficulty lies the opportunity to risk understanding for oneself.
When we introduce arithmetic in the age of the calculator, we make sure our students show their work. That way, they are made aware that the key thing is not getting the right answer, as important as that may be, but seeing how that answer is generated and what it means. Only if they first learn to make sense of math will a calculator not seem a magical and inscrutable device but something that merely imitates a logical process the student knows first-hand. And only if they really understand how to think mathematically can they experience the joy that comes from it.
High-level collegiate writing, in some ways a much more difficult but important skill to acquire, calls for a similar approach. It makes sense to have students show their work so they can appreciate the fact that it is not about generating a professional-sounding product, as important as that may be, but knowing how to achieve that result through independent and creative thinking.
Last fall, my freshmen wrote out their thoughts by hand, like countless others before them, including Edith Stein and Thomas Aquinas. And they not only turned in their final product; they instead provided three items: a page of detailed brainstorming, their full manuscript (first draft), conspicuously edited, and then their final script (no alterations allowed, just a cleaned-up copy). I graded not only the result but also the building and rebuilding, giving credit for courage in taking new directions.
The results were not only spectacular but also surprisingly legible. I do not know whether competence has ever been so evenly distributed across an entire class. It was harder to do, but just for that, harder to do poorly. The brainstorming showed fits and starts, trial and error. The draft had whole paragraphs excised and new sentences scrawled in the margins. Here was thinking being thought out and rethought, visited and revisited, hazarded and accepted.
In other classes, I have introduced one-on-one oral exams or, if scheduled in a block, a three-hour monitored writing assignment. But what I like best is the well-wrought piece, thought-out and rethought-out—by hand.
Safeguarding the Path to Joy
Edith Stein wrote of the joy she experienced in writing her dissertation, in that glorious activity of confronting the truth and making discoveries that no one had ever before made. “The writing would bring a rosy glow to my face, and an unfamiliar feeling of happiness surged through me.” That joy of discovery experienced at the apex of academic achievement can also be available, to some small extent, to those at the very start of the academic journey.
To that end, we cannot shield the novice from the terror of that first beginning, of forging a path for oneself through unexplored terrain, allowing for the inevitability of doubling back and starting anew repeatedly. Joy only comes to those who first find hope in the face of fear. We ought not to make the quest for efficiency and the desirability of legibility, which led to the typescript, to distract us from independent thinking, which is what education has always been about.
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical is a needful reminder of the gift of education in any age but especially in our own. “Do not renounce your ability to think,” he wisely counsels us.
