Nathan Barczi is MIT Chaplain and Associate Director and Senior Theologian of the Octet Collaborative, a Christian study center serving MIT, Associate Pastor at Christ the King Church in Newton, Mass., and is a senior fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He holds a PhD in theology from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in economics from MIT. He did his undergraduate work at Stanford University in his native Silicon Valley, and he lives with his wife and their three children in Somerville, Massachusetts.
I can recall one of my favorite math teachers, Mr. Hansen, exulting with glee at the beauty of a particularly hard proof: “Math triumphs again!” Another, Mr. Mathiesen, delighted in his demonstration of the conservation of energy, which involved a student holding a bowling ball on a pendulum up to his face, letting it swing, and flinching as it returned, always stopping just inches from his nose. Mr. Boggie’s stated role was to teach us American history, but he could never resist inserting the local stories of how World War II or the tumult of the Vietnam era had impacted then-agrarian Cupertino, California. And Mr. Galliart was the English teacher I could always rely on to suggest additional readings on subjects I found particularly engrossing, his eye twinkling as he handed over his personal, well-thumbed copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
I am grateful for these teachers who loved what they taught. They loved their subjects, publicly and infectiously, and in pointing me toward goodness, beauty, and truth, they loved me. The role of human educators in the age of AI is, quite simply, love. There is nothing new about this: this has always been the role of human educators, but it bears emphasizing in the age of AI because we are being tempted to hand education over to a technology that cannot love students, because it cannot love anything, because that is not what our tools are for.
Let’s back up.
What is the purpose of education? For Aristotle, Aquinas, and those in their tradition, it is human formation. Specifically, it is meant to cultivate virtue, those stable dispositions of character that enable us to respond in the right way, for the right reason, in all circumstances of life, so that we might flourish. Thomas Aquinas concurred, though adding that human flourishing was ultimately found in union with God. This process of formation is what Aquinas would have called a process of perfection, by which he meant that it moves the person being formed toward the good for which they were created.
This makes education a species of love. To love another means to desire and to act for their good, and to seek to be united to them. Educators who form the humanity of their students pursue their good, and they equip them to live lives of flourishing. They seek union with their students in their common love of what they teach. Math, art, history, language, science: these are more than useful skills for making a living. They are true, good, and beautiful. The best educators love their subjects and want their students to love them too, so that their students will live happy, flourishing lives. As Plato wrote in the Republic, “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” Only human educators can pursue these ends. An AI cannot seek the good of students and strive to be united with them in that good, because an AI has no good of its own outside of the purposes defined for it by its makers. Tools are helpful, but tools do not, and cannot, love you.
I realize that what I’ve sketched here is not the prevailing view of the purpose of education in modern Western society, which tends to be more utilitarian. Questions of whether a bachelor’s degree is “worth it” are framed in economic terms: how much does college boost lifetime earnings? How long does it take to pay off the debt incurred in earning a particular degree? These are not unimportant questions - mounting levels of student indebtedness are worthy of concern, and the moves by many elite universities to reduce or eliminate tuition even for the middle class are laudable. But the singular focus of many students (not to mention parents and policymakers) on questions such as these indicates that the value of education is being understood primarily in economic terms: education is viewed as a means of gaining marketable skills, and little else.
If this is the purpose of education, then it’s hard to see why we wouldn’t delegate teaching to AI, at least in principle. If AI is not yet as good as a human teacher in transferring skills, it likely will be, someday, sooner than we think. Why, as its proponents argue, would we not provide every student with their own personal AI tutor, with access to all the information in the world, able to tailor its instruction to the individual student's level, strengths, and weaknesses? Wouldn’t this vastly reduce inequities in our current educational system? And again, there is something to this argument. Job market preparation is a purpose of education, if not its primary one, and reducing educational inequality is an admirable goal. So what’s wrong with this argument? Two things at least.
The first is that while we can approve of the intention to relieve inequities, introducing AI into the classroom lets us off the hook too easily and risks introducing a new, potentially more insidious form of inequality. AI tempts us to believe that we can find a shortcut to fulfilling our obligation of presence, attention, and love to every student, each one equally bearing the Image of God. If we go down this path, the most likely outcome will be that students of means will continue to be educated by human beings. At the same time, the poor will suffer the effects of having a massive social experiment in AI education being run on them. Already, conversations like those being hosted in this essay space are largely taking place at elite universities, including the one I serve as a chaplain. How can we ensure that our well-intentioned caution doesn’t exacerbate the very inequality that proponents of AI are trying to address?
The second and more fundamental problem with outsourcing education to AI is that it fails to respect the core purpose of education. AI may be effective in helping students develop marketable skills, though this has not been demonstrated (and recent research from MIT indicates that the use of AI is likely detrimental to critical thinking, writing, and long-term retention of learning).1 But the purpose of education is to form human beings for lives of flourishing. Effects resemble their causes: the most fitting way to form the love of a human being is through the love of another human being. Is it the only way? I don’t think we can claim that. If that were the case, there would be no such thing as an autodidact, motivated by his or her own passion to learn from whatever resources are available - books, nature, or, quite possibly, an AI tutor. But to allow AI to replace human educators intentionally would mean choosing, at best, to retain only the utilitarian value of acquiring skills, and to sacrifice, for the sake of cost or convenience, the far more meaningful relationships that form between teacher and student, or between students, when two human beings pursue learning together out of common love for the subject matter and for one another. We would lose the formative aspects of those relationships, which extend far beyond the immediate realm of the subject under study, molding the very character of student and teacher alike. We would tragically spurn the great gift that teaching can be, to teachers and students alike, when it is understood as a species of love.
The role of human educators in the age of AI isn’t much changed from what it’s always been: it is to love students by loving what we teach and teaching them to love it with us. We have new tools at our disposal, and we are going to have to think long, hard, and in deliberate concert with one another about how best to use them (I seem to spend most of my time at MIT doing just that). But they are tools, and they cannot replace us unless we fall prey to the misconception that education is merely the transfer of skills. If education is about human formation, then it calls for well-formed human beings, drawn to teaching by their dual love of their subject and love of their students, to seek to form in those students the same love, for the students’ good and for the joy of union with them. At its best, teaching is an exercise in sustained, communal attention; this cannot be shared with a chatbot, and so the chatbot can never take the place of the teacher.
The love of human educators becomes love for their students, and so they love their students into becoming lovers of the good. Here’s what this looks like in practice at MIT, where I serve as a chaplain and theologian for the Octet Collaborative, a member of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers.
A professor directs a program that integrates the humanities into the notorious first-year science core. She hosts dialogues, debates, and conversations that matter about the values and the ultimate questions lying beneath the science. She creates a warm, welcoming space two floors below the bioengineering department, where a lounge full of old, comfortable couches and dining tables adjoins her office and the classroom where she teaches. She makes tea. She bakes bread. During COVID, she writes letters to her students, sharing pictures of her garden and reminding them to spend time outdoors and to stay connected to one another.
Another professor, having earned tenure and spun technologies into successful products, begins to consider how he can invest more of his time in the lives of his students as human beings. He notices that every semester, one or two of them come to his office distraught, suffering burnout and laboring under the intense pressure felt by students who have been told that they will change the world, but have just gotten their first B - or D, for that matter. He suspects that it’s not just one or two of his students who feel this way; he suspects that something is off about the messages MIT is sending its students about what success means and their value beyond productivity. So, he designs a class to name the crisis, expose false perceptions, and explore ways that MIT students can live rich, fulfilling lives in which their, yes, world-changing talents serve, rather than define their value as human beings.
Yet another professor, who has already built a long and illustrious career in which he has held senior administrative roles in academia and beyond, is concerned about how engineering impacts the real world. He knows the importance not only of systems, models, and devices, but of the character of the people who develop and deploy them, because he has seen it go wrong. He asks: how can I prepare the current generation of students to enter the workforce and truly serve human flourishing? So he, too, designs a class on character, virtue, and leadership - case studies that demonstrate that who his students are matters as much as what they know.
Two more professors, both leading experts in technology, teach a class that gives students a chance to step back and ask what kind of future they genuinely want to build, and evaluate whether their work in science and engineering is moving us in that direction. The course invites students to draw from their most deeply held values, and to evaluate them with a critical eye and the insights of peers and mentors. When they discuss the use of AI for classwork, they set out clear rules about what is out of bounds, but spend more time talking to their students about their hopes for how they will develop, not only intellectually but morally and spiritually, over the course of the class, and encourage them to avoid substituting chatbots for deep reflection or real human interaction.
I am grateful for teachers who loved what they taught, and so loved me. I am grateful that my formation has been impacted by their investment in me; I didn’t just learn facts and acquire skills, but inherited from them a love of what they taught me and of the practices of learning and teaching that they modeled. Today, I am grateful to serve teachers who love their students in the context of their work as scientists and engineers. Artificial intelligence is a wonderful tool, whose uses are still being discovered, but it does not love, and so it cannot form students to love what is true, good, and beautiful. The role of human educators is to love their students, and in this, they are irreplaceable.
The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more, visit cscmovement.org.
Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, and Pattie Maes. “Your Brain on Chatgpt: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872 (2025), also available at https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ (accessed February 16, 2026).
Thank you Nathan. I will be sharing your good work at my workplace as well as my Friday email correspondence. Well said.
Wonderful essay! Wish I could take every one of these classes. “Teaching is an exercise in sustained, communal attention”—I’ll be thinking about that one for a while.