Reason independently
Evaluate evidence and distinguish justified conclusions from fluent assertion.
Studia Humanitatis
Human formation for the age of artificial intelligence.
What should an educated and capable person be able to understand and do in an age of intelligent machines?
A contemporary framework
The objective is the formation of capable people.
The Renaissance studia humanitatis cultivated the capabilities needed for intellectual, professional, and civic life. The modern framework joins those humanist practices with technological understanding, evidence, institutional knowledge, and practical judgment.
Education should care about both the quality of the work and the development of the person.
Seven domains of formation
The contemporary studia humanitatis
01
Language, Rhetoric, and Interpretation
Developing the ability to reason, interpret, question, argue, and communicate with clarity.
02
Historical Judgment
Using experience across time to distinguish continuity, novelty, consequence, and adaptation.
03
Knowledge, Evidence, and Inquiry
Understanding how claims become knowledge and how evidence should change belief.
04
Artificial Intelligence and Technological Understanding
Understanding intelligent systems well enough to use, evaluate, and delegate to them intelligently.
05
Human Purposes, Agency, and Judgment
Forming purposes, making consequential choices, directing delegated work, and revising course.
06
Institutions, Economics, and Collective Action
Understanding how people coordinate capability, authority, knowledge, and responsibility through institutions.
07
Art, Literature, and Human Creation
Developing imagination, aesthetic judgment, authorship, and the capacity to create meaningfully.
Practice and formation
Capability develops through use.
Studia Humanitatis joins study with practice. Learners should formulate arguments, investigate evidence, work directly with intelligent systems, examine institutions, make decisions, create artifacts, test ideas, and evaluate the consequences of their choices.
Artificial intelligence can extend this practice through critique, simulation, experimentation, research, and creation. The educational task is to structure those experiences so that assisted performance becomes durable capability.
The value of AI-assisted learning lies partly in what the learner becomes capable of doing because of it.
The educational test
What greater capability remains because the person undertook the work?
AI-assisted learning has developmental value when the learner emerges able to understand, judge, create, communicate, or act more capably because of the experience.
The AI Humanist
Human formation integrates capability.
The AI Humanist should emerge able to:
Use artificial intelligence wisely
Understand intelligent systems well enough to use their capabilities without surrendering judgment.
Turn abundance into understanding
Convert abundant information and synthesis into knowledge, expertise, and insight.
Exercise judgment
Form purposes and make consequential choices about delegation, uncertainty, and responsibility.
Understand institutions
Recognize how authority, accountability, expertise, and collective action are organized.
Communicate and create
Express consequential ideas clearly and create with imagination and discernment.