Should a seventh grader use artificial intelligence to write an essay? Should a teacher use it to plan a lesson? Should a graduating senior rely on it to make an important decision?
These are no longer questions schools can avoid.
Artificial intelligence can write, analyze, create, summarize, plan, and solve in seconds. Whether we are excited by that, concerned about it, or somewhere in between, education has to respond.
At CBA, I believe our response should begin with a question much older and more important than artificial intelligence: What is education actually for?
If education is simply about producing an answer, technology will increasingly be able to do much of the work.
But that has never been our understanding of education.
A Lasallian education is about forming a person. It is about teaching a young person to think, question, create, persevere, discern, believe, serve, and ultimately become the person God calls them to be.
That distinction should guide everything we do with artificial intelligence.
AI is already here. Our students are encountering it, and it will undoubtedly be part of the colleges, workplaces, and communities they enter. Pretending otherwise would fail to prepare them for their future. But endlessly chasing technology simply because it is new would be equally misguided.
Our mission must lead to our use of technology, not the other way around.
The Church has offered similar guidance. In its recent reflection on AI and education, Antiqua et Nova, the Church recognizes the potential of these tools, while insisting that technology must remain at the service of human formation and can never replace the indispensable relationship between teacher and student.
Last year, CBA developed an AI Vision Statement rooted in our Catholic and Lasallian identity. It begins with a conviction that I believe will become increasingly important: artificial intelligence may be a powerful tool, but it must always remain secondary to the sacred relationships that define our community.
This year, we are beginning to put that vision into practice.
We have partnered with ForEDU, an educational AI platform founded by CBA graduate Devin Daly ’07. There is a deep beauty in having a former student, someone formed in these very halls, building tools to help our teachers carry that same mission forward to the next generation. ForEDU provides teachers with AI tools to support planning, differentiation, feedback, assessment, and other aspects of their work.
But what interests me most is not what technology can do. It is what we are asking it to do.
Devin and his team customized ForEDU for CBA by integrating our Portrait of a CBA Graduate. Our teachers can now use the platform to help create learning experiences, while intentionally considering the qualities we believe should distinguish a CBA education.
How might this lesson help a student seek truth with greater discernment? Develop moral courage? Deepen faith? Strengthen resilience? Better understand their responsibility to others?
We are not changing our mission to accommodate technology. We are asking technology to serve our mission.
And sometimes serving our mission will mean choosing not to use AI.
There is value in struggling with a difficult problem. There is value in staring at a blank page and finding your own words. There is value in wrestling with an idea, getting something wrong, trying again, and discovering that you are capable of something you did not know you could do. In fact, sometimes the struggle is the education.
Our AI Vision Statement intentionally protects “intellectual struggle and authentic scholarship,” because education loses something essential when we confuse making learning more efficient with making learning better.
At the same time, there is routine work that technology can help accomplish. If AI gives a teacher more time to know a student, provide meaningful feedback, differentiate instruction, create a better learning experience, or accompany a young person who needs them, we should explore that opportunity thoughtfully.
Our vision captures this aspiration in a phrase I especially appreciate: “By minimizing the mundane, we magnify the transformative.”
Perhaps that is the deeper challenge of educating young people in an age of artificial intelligence.
As technology becomes capable of doing more for us, we must become increasingly discerning about what it should never do instead of us.
AI can produce an answer. It cannot give a young person wisdom.
It can imitate creativity. It cannot replace the experience of discovering one's own voice.
It can make us more efficient. It cannot tell us what is worth doing.
Those are questions of judgment, conscience, faith, relationship, and purpose. And they remain profoundly human.
The technology our seventh graders use when they graduate from CBA will almost certainly look very different from what exists today. We cannot know where all of this is headed. But we can know who we are. And perhaps that is why formation matters more, not less, in an age of artificial intelligence.
Our responsibility is not simply to teach students how to use powerful tools. It is to form young people with the wisdom to know when to use them, the discernment to know when not to, the integrity to use them honestly, and the humanity to remember that what is possible is not always what is good.
That is not a new mission for CBA. It is our enduring mission applied to a new moment.
Mr. Matthew Keough
President, Christian Brothers Academy
