When AI Enters the Classroom, the Human Element Becomes the Irreplaceable Variable

When AI Enters the Classroom, the Human Element Becomes the Irreplaceable Variable

A physics and data science professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville recently described what happens when artificial intelligence is handed too much of the educational process: students begin faking competence while avoiding actual learning. Technology can transfer information. It cannot transfer wisdom. It cannot produce virtue. And it cannot do what a mentor does when a student's curiosity is still unformed and fragile.

The EWTN News report on educators weighing AI in the classroom [1] surfaces a debate that is, at its core, not about technology at all. It is about what education is for.

What Formation Requires That No Algorithm Can Supply

Fernanda Psihas, the Franciscan University professor cited in the report, offered a formulation worth sitting with: education is about turning knowledge into wisdom, and turning skills into virtue and character [1]. This names a process that is irreducibly personal, one that requires a human presence capable of reading a student's confusion, tracking the arc of their development, and making the kind of judgment that no grading algorithm can approximate.

The person is not a data set. The person is not a bundle of competencies to be optimized. The person is a rational, relational, embodied being whose flourishing depends on genuine encounter, on being known and guided by another person who has themselves undergone formation. The therapeutic alliance literature within positive psychology makes a parallel argument: outcomes improve not primarily because of the technique deployed but because of the quality of the relationship in which that technique is embedded [2].

AI cannot hold a therapeutic alliance. It cannot hold a pedagogical one either.

The Risk Psihas Names Is Specific

The risk of AI in education is not simply that students will cheat. The risk is subtler. Cognitive offloading, her term for delegating mental effort to AI tools, disrupts the learning process itself [1]. When a student outsources the struggle of forming an argument, they bypass the cognitive friction through which understanding actually develops. Struggle is not an obstacle to learning. It is the mechanism.

Research in educational psychology supports this. Productive struggle, working through difficulty without immediate resolution, is associated with deeper encoding, greater retention, and more flexible application of knowledge [3].

Psihas has responded with practical ingenuity: she AI-proofs her assignments by running them through AI tools first, observing what they generate, then redesigning them to require thinking that AI cannot fake [1]. She also maintains transparency with students about her own use of AI for grading multiple-choice tests and generating datasets. This is not merely a pedagogical technique. It is a model of accountability.

Pope Leo XIV's Framework

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas enters this conversation as a clarifying lens [4]. The argument that AI must be used in ways that further human development is a positive claim about what technology is for. Tools serve the person. The person is not reshaped to serve the tools.

In the domain of mental health, the proliferation of AI-driven wellness applications and automated therapy platforms raises the same structural question. If the therapeutic relationship is the active ingredient in psychological healing, what happens when that relationship is simulated rather than real [2]? What happens to the person who learns to regulate their emotional life through an interface rather than through the risky, rewarding work of genuine human connection?

Resilience is not built through frictionless experience. It is built through supported struggle, through relationships that hold a person steady while they work through difficulty, and through the internalization of meaning that only comes from a framework larger than the self [3].

Paolo Carozza and the Question of Reality

Notre Dame Law School professor Paolo Carozza, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, adds a philosophical dimension to what Psihas grounds in classroom practice [1]. His concern is that technology must orient users toward a fundamental understanding of reality, including the reality of what it means to be human. That names a specific danger: the immersive convenience of AI-mediated experience could distort the user's relationship to what is actually real.

For students, this might appear as an inability to tolerate the ambiguity of genuine inquiry, or as a flattening of the difference between a well-sourced argument and a plausible-sounding fabrication. For anyone navigating mental health challenges, the analogous distortion might appear as a preference for algorithmically curated emotional validation over the more demanding engagement of authentic community [4].

Formation is precisely the process of developing the capacity to meet complexity with equanimity rather than avoidance.

A Values-First Approach

Psihas describes her pedagogy as values-first: use AI to increase efficiency so that human attention can be directed toward the learning that actually matters [1]. Use it to free up time for mentorship, for the kind of conversation in which curiosity is nurtured. Do not use it as a substitute for the cognitive and moral work that constitutes genuine education.

AI tools can support administrative functions, surface relevant research, and extend the reach of services to populations who would otherwise go unserved. These are genuine goods. They become distortions only when positioned as replacements for the therapeutic relationship, the pastoral encounter, or sustained human accompaniment [2].

Efficiency is a means. Formation is the end.

The educators quoted in the EWTN News report are not technophobes [1]. Psihas teaches data science. Carozza engages with global institutions shaping technology policy. Their concern is not with artificial intelligence as such but with the conditions under which it either serves or undermines human development. That concern is the same one that animates Magnifica Humanitas [4].

The classroom is a formation space. So is every context in which a person is accompanied through difficulty toward greater wholeness. The tools available in those spaces will continue to change. The goal will not.

Sources

[1] EWTN News. (2025). Catholic educators weigh benefits, drawbacks of AI in the classroom. EWTN News. https://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-educators-ai-classroom

[2] Norcross, J. C., & Wampold, B. E. (2011). What works for whom: Tailoring psychotherapy to the person. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(2), 127–132. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20764

[3] Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457

[4] Pope Leo XIV. (2025). Magnifica Humanitas [Encyclical letter]. Vatican Publishing House.