To Live and Teach as a Creature

Helping our students to grapple with the messiness of life

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Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash

"It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." - Wendell Berry

One advantage of AI tutors is that their neighborhoods can’t burn down.

We're taking it one day at a time over here as we try to find new patterns and rhythms in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire. It's hard to describe the feeling precisely, but I imagine it's something like how a plant would feel after being ripped out of the soil. The roots—those channels through which the plant's nutrients flow—are just hanging in mid-air, exposed to the elements, and cut off from the life-giving soil. The only solution is to re-root. Finding the right soil is a challenge.

The process of being uprooted and searching for a new normal is disorienting, to say the least. It's even more challenging to experience the discontinuity between life at home and life at work. While one is unmoored, the other ramps up with the normal cadence of a new semester, rapidly climbing toward terminal velocity. One half in free fall, the other in takeoff.

In the midst of all of this, I've been thinking about what this experience is like for my students. So many have reached out with thoughtful notes of support and care. It’s been very meaningful. Not only that, but I get the sense that many more are thinking about it too, but just don't know how to engage. I get it, it's uncomfortable. Figuring out how to interact with your professor when they're going through challenging life circumstances is probably an order of magnitude more awkward than running into them in the neighborhood Trader Joe’s. And from what I’ve heard, the Trader Joe’s interaction is already pretty weird.

We should relish the awkwardness of these situations. There are certainly appropriate boundaries to be held, but more often than not I think we build walls with students that deprive them of meaningful educational experiences. It's not that the skills and knowledge that we teach in our classrooms aren't valuable. It's just that what it means to flourish as a human being encompasses so much more than that.

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When I think about the questions facing us about AI and education I often ponder the Wendell Berry quote at the top of this essay. Whatever you think about Wendell Berry, it's hard to ignore his insight here. Unfortunately, he no longer needs to imagine the "next great division." In so many ways, we’re living it today.

While it is certainly an extreme case, my experiences over the past few weeks provide an interesting data point in the conversation about creature vs. machine. A creaturely existence is deeply connected not only to the natural order but to our limitations and weaknesses. It is a way of living that understands that we are frail, finite, dependent people living with many things out of our control. Living as a creature means to understand, and even to honor, these dimensions of our existence.

Machines, on the other hand, are deeply connected to a desire to control our world. Their lack of human limitations is a feature, not a bug. Machines fragment our lives into narrow domains where they can perform their tasks, using our creaturely contributions only where they are needed.

As we think about AI tutors and the ed-tech holy grail of personalized education, we should keep the creature/machine distinction in mind. Is the goal of an education to cultivate a creature or to mold a machine?

Whether you like it or not, many of the touted benefits of AI tutors are directly connected to their inhumanity. We try to clothe these machines with creaturely characteristics like care, patience, and empathy. But there is no creature beneath the facade. Whatever sense you have of these characteristics is a feeble impersonation of the real thing.

In my own practice as an educator, I choose the messy, creaturely way. The way that exposes the untidyness of my reality. The way that makes visible the joys, pains, challenges, and questions that I experience.

Because, of course, this is the only way to truly love and care for our students. Because they too are dealing with the stresses and obstacles of the creaturely way. In leading with vulnerability we provide a path for them to deepen their understanding of what it means to live as a creature. And maybe, just maybe, we can help them to understand how they might find their way through their creaturely existence.

While I believe there are opportunities for AI to be deployed in ways that can help students learn, the menu of options is limited. Our unique capability as creatures is to embrace our vulnerability and weakness, both for our own good and as an example for our students.

If the next great division is between creature and machine, I already know what side I’m on.

Got a thought? Leave a comment below.