GoKawiilCOMMENTARY: In an era when AI can write anything, authentic education must go beyond the mere production of words.
“The end then of Learning,” wrote John Milton in 1644, “is to repair the ruines of our first Parents.” The image is hard to improve: education as repair, as recovery, as the restoration of capacities diminished by sin and neglect.
Four centuries later, in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI), that image has become urgent again — because we are now surrounded by a technology that offers to perform, on demand, much of what we had long assumed education required us to do ourselves.
I came across Milton’s passage by chance while browsing a collection of the English writer’s works and opening it to his 1644 tract Of Education. Milton was not writing about algorithms. Yet he saw with unusual clarity the educational error that AI now magnifies: the confusion of language with learning.
Language, he wrote, is “but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.” He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
No technology in recent memory has so enlarged the instrument. Large language models such as ChatGPT can summarize books, draft essays, organize research notes, translate passages, generate code, and imitate the prose that schools and universities have long taken as evidence of education.
Used with discipline, they can be genuinely useful. A professor may use them to prepare discussion questions. A researcher may use them to survey literature more quickly. An administrator may use them to accelerate routine writing. It would be foolish to deny their utility.
But utility is not the same as education, and AI magnifies an older weakness. It tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty — it is substitution.
For Catholic education, that substitution matters because learning is not the production of acceptable performances but the formation of a person capable of truth, judgment and responsibility.
Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
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