A recent essay in The New York Times observed something striking: faced with the rise of artificial intelligence, many universities are abandoning the very assignments that have defined higher education for the last century. Out-of-class essays, research papers, and take-home reflections are being replaced with oral exams, blue book tests, viva voce defenses, and in-class recitations. In other words, some universities are, ironically, going medieval.
The author meant this quite literally. In the earliest universities, books were scarce, and education centered not on students producing polished written work at home, but on oral exchange, memorization, and live demonstration of knowledge. Now, with A.I. making “original” take-home writing a breeze with the use of Chat GPT, professors are rediscovering what ancient teachers knew: sometimes the truest measure of learning is what a student can say, recall, and reason in the moment.
For many, this feels like a dramatic shift, even a loss. But for those of us in classical Christian education, it sounds more like recognition. The practices universities are scrambling to recover – recitation, disputation, dialogue, and narration – have never left our classrooms.
What some universities are calling “new,” we call normal
Whereas much of modern education has trained students to produce assignments for evaluation, classical schools have long emphasized formation through practice. Consider a few examples:
- Recitation and narration: Students don’t just consume information; they are asked to speak it back in their own words, training memory, attention, and articulation.
- Oral examinations and disputation: From lower school “show what you know” sessions to upper school thesis defenses, students learn to reason aloud and think on their feet.
- Copywork and dictation: Far from drudgery, these exercises internalize grammar, syntax, and style.
- Socratic discussion: Students are formed through dialogue, not detached consumption.
These methods are not “medieval relics.” They are enduring tools for cultivating wisdom and virtue—tools resistant to shortcuts because they demand presence, attention, and personal engagement.
AI reveals what was fragile all along
If A.I. can replace a student’s essay, perhaps the assignment was never about formation to begin with. A five-page paper dashed off at midnight and forgotten after grading measures productivity, not wisdom. What classical schools understand (and what universities are relearning) is that the aim of education is not efficient output but the holistic teaching of the entire person.
The rise of A.I. has simply unmasked how fragile output-driven education really is. If the goal is merely to submit something, then yes, a machine will always be faster. But if the goal is to cultivate a student’s mind and soul, then nothing can replace the slow, human work of dialogue, imitation, and memory.
A strange providence
There is irony here. Technology, the very thing that promised efficiency, may be pushing higher education to recover the slow, human practices it once abandoned. What feels like regression may actually be renewal.
Ralph Janikowsky, one of our SCL Fellows and retired Head of School at Westminster Academy in Memphis, put it plainly when he first sent us the article: “Translation – classical education is going to be the best preparation for the style of learning and assessing that universities are being forced to adopt due to AI. While I have long argued classical education is the best preparation for any college and beyond, it will be even more true in the years to come.”
For classical Christian schools, this is encouraging. We are not scrambling to redesign our pedagogy in the face of A.I. We are already rooted in methods that have stood the test of centuries. Our students still narrate, recite, and defend. They still learn to speak truth aloud, in their own voice.
And perhaps now the wider world is beginning to see: the way forward in the age of machines may look remarkably like the past.
