The End of Education As We Know It: Cultivating a Rightly Ordered Use of Technology
In November 1987, the rock band REM released a song that seems to capture how many feel where everything seems to be shifting and changing around us. Originally appearing in the United States that fall and re-released in 1991 in the United Kingdom, the song had limited success breaking into the Billboard Top 100 and reaching 39 on the UK Singles Chart. The song gained a revivification of sorts after major world events including the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers and again during the COVID-19 pandemic where deep fear and uncertainty spread throughout our communities. While our current cultural moment is obviously not as dire as terrorist attacks or a pandemic, looking at the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and some of the ominous warnings coming from those in the industry about what we are creating might cause one to think that we are quickly heading down a path which might actually usher in the end of the world as we know it. From bold predictions of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to use of the tools throughout industries like business, education, and war, AI is revolutionizing much of the world as we know it and many do not feel fine.
Even a cursory look at education journals like the Chronicle of Higher Education, major news sites, and much of the conversation in faculty lounges will quickly reveal that education seems in peril with some even claiming that we have reached the end of traditional education and how the standard practices of the university must be abandoned if we have any hope of saving these institutions. As we embark on this new iteration of the university, many argue that we must begin using these tools and widely adopting them in our classrooms, teaching technical skills so that our students will be AI ready, and embrace the almost deterministic push to get on board with the AI revolution or get left behind. Many professors, teachers, and administrators feel the tension of AI and a vision of Christian higher education but have defaulted to asking the question of how best to use these tools in education rather than the more foundational question of the true end of technology and education in the first place. Instead of declaring the end of education as we know it, maybe we ought to be asking an alternate version of the end of education by asking what the purpose/end of education is in the first place. Instead of simply debating what could go right or what could go wrong with AI, we should rather ask what is gained, lost, and is changing as we embark on this brave new world of AI. Like all technology, AI is not just a neutral tool we use for good or ill. It is one that is forming and shaping us in dramatic ways, including how we view God, ourselves as human, and the world around us including the ultimate end of education in the first place. We must first see what it is before we can wisely navigate the challenges before us in higher education in our age of AI, lest we have a truncated view of the problem and a truncated solution as well.
What is Technology?
Asking the question of what technology is might seem a bit silly to most, especially academics. But this is one of the most central questions we can ask about the role of technology in higher education. Most of our students are known as “digital natives” since they likely do not remember a day without access to the internet through handheld devices that never leave their sides. Even as faculty members, many of us have grown increasingly dependent on these devices for so many aspects of our life and career. From classroom prep to research, many of us use these tools every single day. It is not lost on me as I write this paper on my MacBook Pro with my iPad and phone within arm’s reach that I am the beneficiary of particular technological tools and the vast amount of convenience they offer. I am not a techno pessimist railing against the evils of technology, but also not quite a techno optimist either. My hope is to convince you that conversations about the role of technology in our lives rarely ever fit neatly into either category. Wisdom calls us to reject simplistic narratives that gloss over the complexity of the technology in our lives. I prefer to call myself a techno realist with a hopeful disposition.
When many of us think about technology, we as educators understandably default to the question of how best to use these tools and all the advantages of these tools bring in streamlining certain aspects of education. Why do we use any form of technology in the first place? Efficiency has unfortunately become the primary driver of contemporary society especially with technology and education. Efficiency and convenience have in many ways become gods in our society and shape nearly every decision we make today. Anything that is deemed inefficient is to be avoided at all costs.[1] The role of technology in education has often become focused on helping us be more proficient, efficient, and organized. We now have countless apps that we may use to better communicate with our students. We streamline assignments and courses by making them digital. We have course management systems to better organize our curriculum and assignments. And I especially like how many of our students can upload some of their assignments online. This saves time, paper, and even allows me to have some automated checks for plagiarism — including the increasing onslaught of AI-generated assignments. Through these tools, we can track, analyze, and evaluate our students on much more than we might have been able to in the past. Educators are constantly bombarded with new tips, tricks, and digital tools often billed as ways to make things more efficient and effective. But is this really making our teaching richer and more transformative? Does all this technology really serve the true end of education or some bastardized version of the original purpose for which we set out on this journey in the first place?
If you have been teaching for more than a semester or two, you also see the ways that technology may not be all that it has been cracked up to be and how many of the lofty marketing slogans begin to fall flat as we see our students addicted to their devices and uncritically relying on technology throughout their academic journey. Recently, I received a couple emails from a popular AI educational service that I signed up for in order to bypass the limitations on their AI plagiarism checker. In just a few hours, I received back-to-back emails from this company pushing AI use. One from a student perspective encourages them to use these tools to check their work for mistakes and inaccuracies as well as how to write better and do research. The email also mentioned how to make their use of AI “undetectable.” The second was to encourage me as a professor to use more AI in detecting the misuse of AI and even to aid me in grading my students better by making it more efficient. Sooner than later by this logic it seems that we will all have AI grading AI while the students and the faculty alike are seen as inefficient and unneeded in the “educational” process. Welcome to the new AI university!
Many faculty rightly note the negative ways that technology is shaping our students from shortened overall attention spans and constant distraction to poor performance in writing and grammar. While there are a multitude of factors involved, some students even seem to have a deep aversion to difficult and complex ideas that do not fit neatly into cultural narratives. They (and we) seem to be drawn toward what is easy and convenient, that which will entertain us and keep our attention. I have noticed over my years teaching at the college level that critical thinking skills are often yet to be developed even by the end of high school. It seems that many of our students care more about what to believe and what the immediate payoff is rather than the long and difficult process of learning how to think. Now do not get me wrong, what we believe clearly matters but just simply having a lot of information and factual information is not really the point of true education, nor to true wisdom. In an ironic twist, we see many of these shortcomings and misuses of technology yet often employ even more technology in the classroom to solve them. As Canadian philosopher George Grant observing this phenomenon decades ago wrote, “More technology is needed to meet the emergencies which technology produced.”[2] At times, it feels like we are all in a digitally induced coma yet think that more technology will fix it all if only we can streamline and make education more efficient, accessible, and convenient. What is driving this push to more and more technology in education — no matter the cost? Technology, it seems, takes on a life of its own where we are not simply using it but at times it feels like it uses us.
In the philosophy of technology, there are two primary views in which people often discuss the nature of technology.[3] First, technological instrumentalism focuses on technology as a tool or instrument where the primary purpose of these tools is that which we give them as we use them. This view tends to focus on how one uses these tools, rightly preserving one’s moral agency and accountability. What matters most in this view is how one chooses to use a tool — whether for good or ill. As Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport writes, technological instrumentalism can be described as the idea that “tools are neutral, and what matters in understanding their impact is the cultural context and motivations of the people that develop and use them for specific purposes.”[4] This view can fail to account for the fact that technology is not simply used but does something to individuals and cultures since each tool has a purpose and design in which we are encouraged to use them. In a tool-based view, all that really matters is how we choose to use technology. We can use them for good or evil, but the tools themselves are simply just that — tools. Thus, we often treat our devices and technologies as something that we need to merely manage through tips, tricks, and rules.
Second, technological determinism focuses on the power and purpose of technology, highlighting how technology shapes and forms people and societies from our values to our actions. As Newport notes, this view can be roughly defined as the belief that “features and properties of a given technology can drive human behavior and culture in directions that are often unplanned and unforeseen.”[5] Determinism tends to highlight the fact that no technology is truly neutral as they mediate value to us in various ways often through limiting our choices and shaping our experiences.
Philosophers Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek describe technological determinism as the “pessimistic” view of technology that is often portrayed as at odds with the “optimistic” view, which they attribute to how many Christians typically see technology as part of the cultural mandate found in Genesis 1:28, where technology is simply a tool and is value neutral.[6] But as Canadian thinker Ursula M. Franklin argued, “Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and hears, of the rails and electronic transmitters…. It entails more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.”[7] And this mindset often has particular goal in mind that we must slow down to notice. French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul argued that technology is best described through the lens of determinism, seeing technology as not merely an instrument or value neutral tool, but rather a movement that captures humanity in its grip and transforms everything in the name of efficiency.[8] In line with the Christian moral tradition, Ellul states “that [just because] something might be useful or profitable to men did not make it right or good.”[9] Ellul pointed out that “technical innovations have always had the same surprising and unwelcome character for men.”[10] Here Ellul brought forth an element in the power of technology to shape humanity in ways that are similar to the Christian conception of discipleship. Over a long period of time, exposure to the expanded moral horizons of what is possible with technology and the end for which it is aimed will have a transformative effect and shape the way we see the world including even the purpose of education itself. Technologist and theologian John Dyer states that Ellul and others with a deterministic mindset see that “the more we use technology, the more it mediates to us the value of addressing problems with technological solutions.”[11] This meditation of value is an aspect of how technology is constantly shaping individuals and the larger society with each subsequent innovation.
To illustrate the non-neutrality of technology, media theorist Neil Postman highlights the old saying “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and notes that we may extend that truism by saying “to a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.”[12] Technology here does something to us as it shapes our perspective of the world. Postman argues these truisms call to our attention that every technology has a prejudice, purpose, or design both with intended and unintended consequences.[13] He goes on to state that “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.”[14] We are often so blinded by the formative power of technology that we fail to clearly see many of these values and prejudice, yet this view tends to downplay our agency and responsibility for how we employ these tools. The question we must consider here with AI and its role in education is what is gained, what is lost, and what is changing because these tools are not neutral as they have a particular end that might not always align with the purported end of Christian higher education.
As Christians consider the nature of technology, it seems that both views fail to capture the power of technology. On one hand, technology is indeed a tool that we use, and we are morally responsible for how we develop, deploy, and engage it. But on the other, these tools do seem to mediate certain values to us and shape our perspective of the world around us. As Dyer notes here that both “determinism and instrumentalism have elements of truth to them, but we cannot reduce all discussions about technology in either direction.” He goes on to say that “People are culpable for their choices, but technology still plays a role in influencing the decisions they make.”[15] A Christian philosophy of technology does not fit neatly into either category but reminds us that we are indeed moral agents and that these tools do something to us as they shape us as human beings and how we view the world. Computer scientist Derek Schuurman rightly highlights that technology is not neutral, but instead value-laden.[16] Technology is indeed a tool that we are responsible for how we use but also a tool that forms us and shapes us in distinct, yet subtle ways, pushing particular cultural values on us often without any awareness on our part. Sadly, at times, we seem to be so blinded to the formative aspects of technology that we simply uncritically adopt these tools (or even uncritically reject them as well).
Postman illustrates technological change is not additive, but ecological in nature by having us imagine a bowl of clear water and some red food coloring.[17] He points out that when one adds drops of food coloring to the water that you do not end up with the drops of food coloring and a bowl of clear water, but instead a bowl of pink water. We end up with a colored bowl of water as the food coloring dissipates throughout the water, radically changing its appearance. You simply cannot separate the two once the addition was made. They are forever intermixed and inextricably linked together as both have been changed. Postman notes that this has been true throughout history and is clearly seen in the advent of the printing press in Europe. He states that you did not have old Europe plus a printing press, but a completely new Europe. This is true in education today as well. We no longer have life as usual with some technology and AI added to the educational endeavor, but instead a different environment where the values of technology tend to dominate the true purpose of education.
Technology seems to distract us from that true goal and purpose of education, especially when used in uncritical ways. These innovations are not truly neutral and are designed to push us toward those goals and purposes, the question is not simply can we use a particular tool in the classroom, but should we? As theologian and ethicist Jacob Shatzer warns us, “each tool pushes us toward the goal that the tool is best made for.”[18] He goes on to say that we must be “aware of this, unless we think that our goals in life will always align with the goals that tools were made for,” which I think is especially true for us as educators thinking about how to harness new technologies for kingdom purposes.
If technology is not neutral, then what is changing? What is gained and what is lost with its use in the classroom? Some educators are quite skeptical of technology and assume that we can simply ban it outright. While this mentality is understandable to a degree, this can miss the fact not only is a ban not feasible in most instances but that this does not account for the ways that technology has deeply altered our minds and hearts outside of the classroom. Our students are inundated with these tools and are already using it whether we know it (and can detect it) or not. Their minds have often been trained on a sense of efficiency and this drive changes how they (and all of us for that matter) think about the nature and purpose of education. As Postman once noted, “like the printing press before it, the computer has a powerful bias toward amplifying personal autonomy and individual problem solving.”[19] These values are even more present in the technologies of our day including contemporary uses of AI. Instead of a naïve attempt to ban them, we must do the hard work of understanding these things and accounting for them in our classrooms. This new culture of efficiency in education is one that we need to understand and help prepare our students to navigate as faithful faculty.
Technology and the End of Education
While I wish I could give you with a set of tips and tricks (or rights and wrongs) for using AI in higher education, the unique nature of technology precludes us from such easy answers. Not only is each faculty member and educational context different, but technology’s bent toward efficiency and convivence is too strong for simplistic and gut-level responses. We need more than mere platitudes and slick marketing slogans to address the challenges we face in education today. Faithful faculty must double down on certain core commitments, three of which are discussed below.
First, we must remember and model for our students that education is so much more than simply transferring information and skills. AI technology is quite good at these tasks, but Christian education has a higher end/telos in sight than simply convenience or efficiency toward temporal goods. It is focused on the ideal of whole person transformation which necessarily is inefficient, messy, and not at all easy to document on a chart. When we think of the values of technology, we must see that the values we hold and seek to promote in education may not always align with those of our tools especially as they have an inherent value and predisposition toward efficiency and convenience. Are we simply seeking to raise up a generation of efficient widget makers with lots of information or rather wise and virtuous Christ followers who can love God with their entire being and love their neighbor as themselves? Faithful teaching should not simply be reduced to means to temporal or pragmatic ends, especially the end of efficiency.
In the preface to his aptly titled work The End of Education, Postman writes that “without a transcendent and honorable purpose schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better … [but] with such a purpose, schooling becomes a central institution through which the young may find reason for continuing to educate themselves.”[20] Postman, who was not a Christian, picks up on a theme that is key to this debate over the proper use and place of AI in education especially from a Christian perspective. He reminds us that there must be a higher purpose or telos for education than things like paychecks, professional respect, information, and even the prospect of future employment as these goods will never truly fulfill or give us purpose. There must be something more to the purpose of education than simply what we get out of it. As education philosopher David Diener notes, “if we don’t understand the purpose of education, we won’t be able to appropriately and responsibly use the techniques and the technology we have at our disposal to facilitate a worthwhile education.”[21] The technologies we employ so often are used in ways to make information transfer quicker, better, faster, stronger rather than focus on the inefficient task of whole-person transformation.
Postman notes how so much of education has been taken over by what he calls the “engineering of learning.”[22] It seems to many that education in the last couple centuries has become seen as an industry rather than an art as many teachers have been redirected away from truly “teaching” their students and instead pushed to become mere data collectors and learning engineers. But are we in this profession in order to find the most efficient methods and tools or are we ultimately here to see young people be transformed and truly flourish as human beings, even if that is “inefficient,” time-consuming, and messy? We are not called as teachers to simply to transfer/dispense information and then find more efficient ways to do it over time. We should always be refining our skills, but if we are honest at times, it feels that this efficient progress and engineering of education at times has taken over as the ultimate end of teaching where students are produced rather than transformed as they grow in their skills, crafts, and disciplines in service to the Great Commandment and Great Commission.
One of the ways that we can model this true end of education to our students is to encourage them to think and question things rather than simply memorize. We are not machines that simply process and transfer information but embodied beings who are designed to question, think, and grow in wisdom. Part of our students growing in wisdom as whole people in a digitally saturated age is to understand not only the major turning points in our disciplines and fields, but also the foundational questions and attempts at answers that have been put forth over the years as they themselves prepare to enter the ongoing conversation about the pursuit of the good and wise life in their respective areas. This can be through understanding how other disciplines intersect with our own fields, slowing down to examine the historical undercurrents of culture that drive our disciplines, and asking difficult questions and learning how to think, not just what to think.
We must teach our students how to ask good questions and help them develop critical thinking skills which technology tends to stunt the growth of or atrophy skills once they have been acquired. The use of technology in education today often short circuits the foundational questions of the language of a discipline and the questions that produce them.[23] We must avoid any educational philosophy that disregards or fails to highlight learning the questions, tensions, and failures that shape our disciplines. A helpful question for us to consider in an age of technology is how our teaching exposes students to the “Great Conversation” of those who have come before us and even of our own generation rather than simply the answers we want them to know. Instead of focusing simply on knowledge transfer and processing information, faithful faculty must teach our students how to argue and help them discover what questions are truly worth arguing about. Remember if our goals in the classroom are far more robust and teleologically oriented than the simple drive toward efficiency, then we must think wisely and deeply about the tools we use in the classroom given that their values may not align with the purposes of our courses.
The Dangers of Sleepwalking to the End of Education
Christian education has been and will always be more than simply producing widgets or transferring information as we have a higher telos or goal in this worthy endeavor. The other oriented, teleological orientation to the Christian life we read about in Matthew 22:36-40 is never less than the aim of education as well. Our desire as faculty is to aid our students in their lifelong journey of loving God with every fiber of their being including their minds and bodies as they love their neighbor as themselves. This will require a redoubling of our efforts in a technological age, where values like efficiency, convenience, and speed have become so central to contemporary life. These values are very poor substitutes for our ultimate goal of loving God, which is very often not efficient, convenient, or quick but is worth more than anything in the world.
We must first recognize the deforming effects of technologies like AI on the journey of education, lest we fall prey to simply reacting against the current iterations of these technologies or simply debate the good and bad uses of them. Like Postman arguing about the use of computers in schools, I am not arguing against any use of contemporary technologies like AI in the education per se, but I am “arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it.”[24] We need more than band aid solutions or gut-level responses as to the role of technology in education because these tools aren’t going anywhere and are poised to radically alter the purpose of education. Let’s slow down and think deeply about true purpose of education and what technology is doing to us as we seek to love God and our neighbor throughout our teaching career.
This article is adapted from “Transforming Tools: Pursuing Wisdom and Virtue in Education Amid a Digital Age” in Faithful Faculty eds. Donny Mathis and Jacob Shatzer (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, forthcoming 2026). Used with permission.
Notes:
[1] Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage, 1996), 28.
[2] George Grant, Technology & Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1991), 16.
[3] Elements of this section are drawn from my article “Defining Humanity Down: The Irony of AI and Human Anthropology,” Journal of Christian Legal Thought 14.2 (2024): 1-7.
[4] Cal Newport, “When Technology Goes Awry,” Communications of the ACM (May 1, 2020), available online: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/5/244331-when-technology-goes-awry/fulltext.
[5] Newport, “When Technology Goes Awry.”
[6] See Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek, “Conflicting Visions of Technology,” in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, eds., Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 253.
[7] Ursala M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology, rev. ed. (Toronto: House of Asani, 1999), 2-3.
[8] See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage, 1973); Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Daniel Cérézuelle, and Lisa Richmond (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).
[9] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), 37.
[10] Ellul, The Technological Society, 61.
[11] John Dyer, From the Garden to the City: The Place of Technology in the Story of God, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2022), 63.
[12] Neil Postman, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” (Denver, Colorado, March 28, 1998), available online: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf.
[13] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 13.
[14] Postman, Technopoly, 20. Emphasis original.
[15] Dyer, From the Garden to the City, 86.
[16] Derek C. Schuurman, Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 22.
[17] Postman, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change”
[18] Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 7.
[19] Postman, Technopoly, 45.
[20] Postman, The End of Education, x-xi.
[21] David Diener, “Neil Postman on Education, Technology, and Purpose.” RealClear Education (August 6, 2021), available online: https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/08/06/neil_postman_on_education_technology_and_purpose_110619.html.
[22] Postman, The End of Education, 25.
[23] Postman, The End of Education, 123.
[24] Postman, The End of Education, 44.
Jason Thacker
Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Ethics | The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College