The recent elevation of St. John Henry Newman to Doctor of the Church may become a prophetic challenge to the AI-driven educational revolution just over the horizon.
Pope Leo XIII, who made the newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman, a cardinal in 1879, established the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed dehumanizing labor conditions in the face of the industrial revolution, unchecked capitalism, and socialism. Pope Leo XIV took the name Leo as a way to follow in these footsteps—not due to the threat of industrialization but of artificial intelligence. One of his most recent acts was, of course, the elevation of Newman to Doctor of the Church.
While each Leo honored Newman in distinct ways, both recognized in him a defender of the Christian order against systems that reduce the person to function, output, and use. St. John Henry Newman is known in many ways principally as an educator, being an Oxford don and later writing extensively about the university. Newman has been called (alongside Aquinas) a patron saint of universities and (alongside Seton) of Catholic schools, with the Newman Guide and Newman Centers for Catholic campus ministry at colleges across the country both bearing his name. His work is singularly situated to speak to the difficulty that AI presents to K-12 and postsecondary institutions because he understood and articulated what education ought to be and what a school ultimately aims at.
In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII warned that when labor is treated as a commodity, workers are degraded to “mere instruments of money making.” Today, AI threatens a similar degradation—not only in the workplace but in schools too. Students risk being dehumanized and reduced to data points in a digital system, valued only for measurable outputs. Knowledge is fragmented into ever smaller, quantifiable units, severed from the whole. We are very near to forgetting that all “knowledge is intimately united in itself,” since it comes from the same source: God.
Both Popes Leo have fought and are fighting to preserve the rights and dignity of laborers in the face of technological upheaval. But AI poses a particularly insidious threat to education, attacking not just what students do but who they are. It is here that Newman’s vision of the unity of knowledge and the centrality of the soul to education offers both a warning and a path out of this growing mess.
Newman’s claim in The Idea of a University that education is not transmission of information but intellectual formation—a development of one’s “habit of mind”—is in stark contrast to the axioms of modern progressive education. For Newman, the university was not a tool to produce workers but a true alma mater, nourishing her children as individuals, “one by one.” Today, we have almost completely forgotten what it means for a school to focus on anything other than testable outputs, with terms like “data-driven instruction” truly directing some teachers’ entire professional lives. Newman reminds all educators that each student is a soul to be formed and shaped, not a producer to be programmed or a problem to be solved.
Newman’s claim in
In this light, the rise of so-called artificial intelligence in education should not be treated as, on the one hand, a morally neutral technology to be used or misused according to the individual, or, on the other hand, yet another fad pushed on schools that will fade in time and can be safely ignored. In fact, AI in schools is the latest symptom of our civilizational confusion. Tools that generate whole essays, give rapid feedback, or claim to “personalize” (an ironic word choice if ever there was) promise efficiency, but they only do so by redefining education entirely. What AI accomplishes with such impressive speed is not formation but something more akin to a factory’s output.
Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent distinguishes between a logical belief in something and real understanding in one’s heart and mind—this is the fruit of real learning; and it is something that a machine is incapable of ever doing. Pope Leo XIV’s words to the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Rome at the end of June are of particular note to teachers, exhorting us not to confuse “access to data—however extensive…with intelligence.” The power of AI is the volume of data it can process. But real learning cannot be mechanized because it involves judgment, struggle, receptivity to a good teacher—all essentially spiritual acts and certainly out of reach for even the most sophisticated computer model. No machine can direct a soul toward the Good, True, or Beautiful.
News articles speak of AI as a “disruption” to schools. But the truth is that it’s less a disruption and more the culmination of the whole project of progressive education. For decades, teachers and students alike have been trained to think of learning as demonstrable, objective performance. What began with bubble sheet college entrance tests comes full circle to AI-graded essays and AI-directed math tutoring sessions for struggling third-graders.
We are quickly moving toward a model where the soul has no place and the teacher is only a facilitator. AI just hastens what the system has always been heading toward: total automation. St. John Henry Newman stands against this reduction, reminding us of the intensely personal dynamic at play in true education. Pope Leo XIII warned against the mechanization of human life in sole service of economic output, and that warning today extends from factory to classroom. The danger is not merely that students will cheat with AI but that they will lose themselves long before they get the chance.
Newman knew that education is not a system but a relationship. One of the most beautiful reflections on the nature of teaching I have ever come across comes from the Congregation for Catholic Education in 1997: “Teaching has an extraordinary moral depth and is one of man’s most excellent and creative activities, for the teacher does not write on inanimate material, but on the very spirits of human beings.”
Pope Leo XIV, in raising up St. John Henry Newman, gives Newman’s vision of education a greater (and richly deserved) place of honor in the modern day. This is a vision which understands that real teaching involves time and love. In a classroom where the teacher has ceded his role to AI, his judgment is replaced and his knowledge is sidelined, his soul no longer part of the work at all.
The teacher must not be relegated to a facilitator of information transfer. She must be a person in her own right and a moral image of who the student is called to become. Pope Leo XIII was prophetic in recognizing the dangers that industrial labor posed to workers. And both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have followed in identifying the threat of AI. St. John Henry Newman offers a critical perspective on true education, as schools are no less at threat than the workplace.
The Holy Father could hardly have chosen a better time to elevate Newman. It is not just a theological or cultural milestone but a moment for cultural instruction, inviting teachers, school leaders, students, and parents to receive him as a living guide in the present struggle over the soul of education. Newman was not a reactionary, and he did not fear innovation; but he did speak with clarity about the purpose of education. As AI attempts to turn the classroom into an elaborate circuit board, the echo of Newman’s words reminds us that true education begins and ends with the soul.
Author
Luke J. Ayers
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