In one sense, there is no looking back. Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, demanding engagement. Yet, in another sense, that idiom does not completely hold up. Looking back just might be beneficial. 

Loomis Chaffee held a three-day artificial intelligence symposium in June, bringing together educators from secondary and post-secondary institutions to talk about the challenges and opportunities of AI; to think about the place of writing in education; and to imagine what it will mean to be a learner and an educator moving forward. “Techne & Teaching: Critical Literacies” was held June 15–18.  Techne is the ancient Greek word for skill or craft. 

“Bringing different people together and having conversations and trying things together — that kind of experience shows that maybe learning doesn’t happen individually so much as with other people,” said one of the participants, Matthew Linck, who has been on the faculty of St.  John's College in Annapolis, Md., since 2008.  

The symposium looked at foundational papers in the philosophy of technology and computation, led by faculty from St John's; explored writing-based teaching practices with faculty affiliates from the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. ; and took a laboratory approach to AI as an object of study.  

One of the texts was al-Khwarizmi’s The Algebra. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi has been called the father of algebra, which is crucial in algorithms, a fundamental part of computer science. Another was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, part of which is about how words are used, their meaning depending on the context. A third was Plato’s The Phaedrus, a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus written around 370 BC. 

A few weeks after the symposium, John Verdi, tutor emeritus at St. John's College, was asked why might it be important to look to the past, as participants did in readings. He said he does not "think that reading works written long ago needs justification, any more that teaching children arithmetic in an age of calculators needs justification, or teaching them to read in an age when an app can read to you. No, the past has not passed, but is present in what we do today, even if we don’t see it, even if we think we have gone 'beyond' what others have seen and left to us." 

The educators who gathered at Loomis Chaffee, like others around the world, are figuring out how they will incorporate AI and what they will leave for others, not an insignificant task. 

“Part of what we were thinking about is — in this moment that seems unstable and uncertain — what are the critical literacies we want to have as teachers? What are the literacies we want our students to have? One of them certainly is technological literacy,” said Writing Initiatives Director John Morrell, who organized the symposium with Director of Educational and Administrative AI Initiatives Matt Johnson. “To the extent that might be in tension with other literacies we want to preserve, we want to make sure we have space for all of them.” 

Technology evolves.  

“There is a lot of excitement around AI,” Mr. Linck said. “Technology gets more and more powerful, and we're kind of amazed by what we can do ... but not always clear what we are excited about or what the good is in developing technological power. It is easy to get swept up in it and really to be quite impressed and amazed by what machines can do ... and then you think, ‘We did something amazing,’ but maybe there is larger framework in which you want to ask yourself, ‘Is that a good thing in itself?’” 

Maybe the past can help inform the future. 

“We’ve been through this a few times,” John said, “and if we look to the past, there are analogies we might draw — they’re not perfect — but might have insights to offer.” 

Mr. Verdi left the symposium feeling good about the experience. 

"I was expecting high school and college teachers to be full of anxiety about AI and its encroachment on the writing (and therefore the learning) of students," he said. "I was delighted to find that the teachers who attended the symposium, while aware of the dangers of AI, were more interested in discussing how AI can be used to benefit students. This was a big relief for me because I have thought that AI, while new and somewhat mysterious, offers immense possibilities to students to master new techniques of learning. Of course, having spent my entire teaching career at St. John’s, I still strongly believe that learning how to read books and talk about them with other people is a reliable and satisfying way to become educated.” 

St. John’s is a liberal arts college known for its Great Books program and its emphasis on engaging with original texts. 

Like any tool, Mr. Verdi said, AI can find its place at St. John's and other schools, "though we all know that some kind of vigilance is necessary to maintain and promote a true education." 

Eric Charles Hansen, newly appointed Dean of Faculty at the Webb School, a private high school in Claremont, Calif., reflected on the symposium in a Substack post. The post noted that Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman, writes about what is lost with digital tools: “You get to know a terrain by tracing it, and retracing it, not letting the computer ‘regenerate’ it for you.” 

The close of his post addressed “how to preserve the difficulty of learning that only comes, as Sennett says, from tracing and retracing lines, developing a feel for the territory — the hard canyon of learning — that mastery requires. I wonder if kids are now allowed to be as bored as Mozart and Messi were as small children when they had nothing to do but noodle around on a piano or soccer ball.” 

“Then,” Mr. Hansen continued, “on a walk between Loomis Chaffee’s campus to the coffee shop in downtown Windsor, I passed a very green pond where a boy was waiting on two fishing lines propped on the guardrail. From a distance while approaching, I thought I saw him chuck something heavy into the water with a thud, wondered for a moment if he was up to something. Closer, I asked if he’d caught a big, old turtle. ‘Three carp today!’” he said. 

When Mr. Hansen returned two hours later, the boy was still fishing — while talking on a speaker phone. 

There may be benefits in looking back, but even when fishing, it seems, there’s no going back.