The Mad Educator’s Guide to Teaching in the Age of AI: A Manifesto

In an age of cognitive acceleration and cultural drift, you stand at the crossroads of teaching and technology. Love the quick AI fix, the auto-graded quiz, the dashboard of analytics. Want more of everything ready-made — pre-packaged curricula, on-demand answers. Be afraid to let students wander off-script; keep learning tidy and standardized. Do this, and you will have a window in your head, flickering with algorithmic certainties, and nothing left of mystery. Your classrooms will hum with efficiency and hollow out the deeper cognitive processes that make us human. This is the path of technocratic reductionism. Resist it.

Human Dignity Over Data

Put the person before the technology. Insist that every innovation in AI be measured against the “sublime dignity of the human person,” asking always whether these tools respect or erode that dignity. Do not let students be reduced to data points or “minds... punched in a card” – refuse any system that treats them as inputs and outputs. Instead, teach in a way that unfolds the whole person. Ground your pedagogy in how humans truly learn: not a single act but a dynamic structure – experiencing, understanding, reasoning, and deciding. Honor this fullness. Remain rooted in human dignity and cognitional truth, forming persons rather than producing mere users. Let your classroom be a community of inquiry and care, not a conveyor belt of credentials. In each lesson, whisper a quiet rebellion: the student is not a customer, not a machine, but an infinite mystery with an eternal soul.

Form Minds, Not Just Skills

Teach them to think about their thinking. Drill no skill without also asking why and when it should be used. Turn every answer into a question: have students challenge the outputs of AI, cross-examine the chatbot, improve upon its essays. Let them learn by critiquing the AI itself, becoming “critical evaluators of AI, honing the very judgment and metacognitive skills that educators seek to instill”. Do not celebrate skill proficiency at the cost of wisdom. A student who masters tools without judgment is like an apprentice who wields a hammer without knowing what to build. So, forbid intellectual passivity. Make reflection requisite: after every task, have them articulate not just what they did, but why it mattered. Remember that efficiency is not education. “If we focus too much on efficiency and not enough on critical thinking, we risk hollowing out the deeper cognitive processes.” Therefore, slow down where speed seduces. Let students wrestle with problems that have no clear answer, for in that struggle they will learn to discern, to judge, to form conscience and character. In the age of intelligent machines, double down on cultivating intelligent humanity.

Interdisciplinary Imagination

Break the silos. Stitch every subject together until knowledge resembles life itself – seamless, intertwined, alive. Teach computer science with a dose of ethics, literature with a taste of code. Encourage your students to roam across philosophy, theology, design, and economics, finding threads that connect the technological to the humanistic. Your aim is to form modern polymaths – individuals who traverse art and science with ease, “able to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems”. Invite a biologist to speak in your art class, or a poet in your data science seminar. Let ideas collide in fertile chaos. The goal isn’t just knowledge; it’s wisdom – the ability to see the whole. In an era reviving the Renaissance ideal, dare to produce students who are as interdisciplinary as Leonardo, as inquisitive as Aquinas, as ethical as Ashoka. They should see no realm of study as alien, for all truth is connected. By integrating AI into the broader liberal arts, you remind the world that innovation needs inspiration, that engineering needs ethics, that algorithms need a moral algebra. Education must not only keep up with AI, but marry it to humanity’s oldest questions. Do this, and your students will carry forward a vision of wholeness in a fragmented age. Specialization is for insects.

Learning in Community and Practice

Gather in small cohorts and let them get their hands dirty. Learning is a team sport and a contact sport. Create circles, not rows – seminars where every voice matters, project teams that sink or swim together. We see more cohort-based models now – group projects, peer mentoring, tight-knit learning communities – old-school methods gaining new importance as counterweights to digital isolation. Defy the myth that learning is individualized consumption; make it a communal creation. Have students build something real: a community app for a local problem, a prototype business that addresses a social need, a theatre play about technology’s impact. Such experiential formation ensures education is not trapped in theory but tested in practice. Bias your pedagogy toward entrepreneurship and initiative. Let a course be a startup of ideas: the classroom a little incubator where students learn to take risks, fail safely, and try again. When you give them real-world problems and the freedom to solve them together, you show faith in their agency. In these small peer communities, each student finds belonging and responsibility. They learn the habits of leadership and service not by lecture but by doing. A cohort that struggles and learns as one will carry each other further than any could go alone. Teach them to venture out, to found new projects, to see themselves as builders of the future. Under your guidance, the university becomes not just an information hub, but a living workshop for conscience and creativity, where knowledge meets action.

Loving Stewardship of Generative Tools

Wield AI with conscience and care. Teach your students that a tool’s greatness is measured by the good it serves. Do not enthrone the tool; instead, foster a sense of loving stewardship toward technology. Just as a gardener tends the soil for future harvests, let students tend the digital landscape with an ethic of care. Remind them that every code they write, every model they train, implicitly answers the question: What is it for? The only rightful answer is for the flourishing of life and dignity. Insist that technology serve humanity, not the other way around. Ensure that in your classroom technological advances always serve human ends and not vice versa. Discuss the biases an AI can inherit, the inequalities it can widen if left unchecked, the responsibility we have to guide it wisely. Impress upon them that power without conscience is peril. So cultivate conscience: study the great moral teachers alongside the great inventors. Let students debate the telos of their creations — is an AI-generated image art, theft, or something in between? — so that they learn to embed ethical imagination into every design. By the time they graduate, they should see themselves as guardians of technology’s direction. The telos of all this learning is love: love for truth, for neighbor, for the generations to come. A loving steward asks not “what can I do with this tool?” but “what should I do, to heal and uplift?” Inculcate that mindset relentlessly. Remind them that our humanity is the source, the focus, and the end of all our technical endeavors. With that moral clarity, send them forth to create boldly and wisely.

Benediction: Practice resurrection

So, dear educator and leader, every day, do something that won’t compute. Ask the questions that have no easy answers. Plant in your students the seeds of a thousand-year vision — of wisdom, courage, and compassion — even if you will not live to harvest its full fruit. Laugh at the frenzy of the technocrats; laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful in your classroom, though you have considered all the facts. Begin again, rightly in education: revive the lost ideals, rekindle human dignity, recenter learning on love. In this time of great upheaval, stand firm in the old truths even as you embrace new tools. Teach boldly, imaginatively, subversively. Practice resurrection.