Thinking About AI and Teachers From A Christian Perspective

What if artificial intelligence is allowing us to reward our own bad behavior? At what point is the need for the sort of efficiency AI promises to provide driven by our skewed priorities, broken systems, and unwillingness to address our problems through non-technological means? I don't doubt that AI will help humans move beyond where we could go individually or together in certain areas. Like other technological platforms, AI will have its benefits. That's Dr. James Spencer, and you're listening to Thinking Christian. James, AI is here to stay. As we look at various ways AI models are being used, what should we consider about who's benefiting from these new technologies and, perhaps more importantly, how are they benefiting? Well, I mean, there is definitely a tendency to want to follow the money. And so there's definitely a sense in which the technology companies are going to be benefiting from artificial intelligence. Any business that is able to leverage automated processes that were previously performed by humans by using AI, these are going to be companies that benefit. The real question, I think, becomes how does broader society benefit? How do individual people benefit? And how do we as a nation, a world, what is it that we benefit from with AI models? And I think it's going to sort of play out in a lot of different arenas and a lot of different professions. Healthcare certainly seems to have some AI models that are really going to help, but other areas seem to be adopting this without much thought. And they also seem to be adopting this very early when we're really not exactly sure what artificial intelligence is going to do. And so I would say, for instance, if we take a look at the profession of teaching, now we all know that teachers are generally overworked. They teach a lot of students per classroom and, you know, they do sort of a yeoman's job in a lot of ways. And in fact, the Rand Corporation did a study at one point, and they found that more teachers, more than other working adults, report burnout. They report, you know, feeling a lack of resilience to stressful events when compared to other working adults. And so if you're talking to a teacher and they seem to be more stressed than maybe your friend who's a postman or who's, you know, working in a gym somewhere, that's because they probably are. And it's interesting to think about because, you know, as we look at teaching as a profession, the question arises then, well, why is it that teachers are more stressed? Is it that people who are more prone to stress go into teaching or is there something else there? And so there was an interesting, there's an interesting trade-off that I think we want to look at and sort of investigate as we think about teacher burnout. And we can kind of get into that a little bit later. But for the moment, what we're seeing is that these teachers who are reporting a lot of burnout, who are reporting a lot of stress, who are feeling overworked. There was a CBC news story up in Canada that reported that a number of teachers are beginning to use artificial intelligence to help them with their various administrative tasks. And administrative tasks might include things like grading, might include things like creating a syllabus, might include things like developing lesson plans, you know, writing emails to parents, those kind of things. EduAid is an AI platform. It's actually framed as a tool to help eliminate teacher burnout and make high quality teaching resources universally accessible. And so AI is now coming to the rescue of teachers or maybe not. Well, since there's a shortage of teachers, just like just about in every field imaginable and for various reasons, is is teacher burnout overhyped? Well, you know, it's interesting. I found a study and really an op-ed that was based on a study by a journalist named Alexandra Robbins. And she actually suggests that teacher burnout is a myth. It's a term that should be ditched. And she's not trying to say that teachers don't feel burnt out. What she's suggesting is that instead of, you know, teacher putting the blame on teachers for their burnout, right, looking at it in terms of, oh, these poor stressed out teachers, they just need to learn to manage their lives better. What she argues is that this is really a shortcoming of the workplace. It's a shortcoming of school systems. It's a shortcoming of, I would say, the public more generally. And I think she would agree that if we are not appropriately staffing, appropriately funding, appropriately prioritizing public school systems where teachers have to teach, then of course they're going to be feeling a lot more pressure because they just don't have the resources to do what we're asking them to do. And if you've ever, you've probably been in this situation. I tell this story occasionally, Richard, but I worked on a farm when I was in high school over the summer. And it happened to be my my father-in-law. And so he he told me, he left me with a tractor and a wagon. He said, I want you to back the wagon into the barn. Now, if you've ever backed a wagon, it is darn near impossible if you don't know what you're doing. Those go wherever they feel like going, whenever they feel like going. I mean, whenever I see somebody backing a big semi truck with a trailer on it, I'm super impressed because it's not an easy task. So I'm trying to back this wagon into the barn and it keeps jackknifing on me. It keeps turning on me and I just can't figure it out. So by the time I decided that the tractor was not going to work for me, the wagon is actually further away from the barn than when I started. And so I ended up, you know, sort of feeling like I need to get this task accomplished. I didn't want my father-in-law making fun of me. So I unpin the wagon and start pushing this, pushing it into the barn just under my own strength. Right. Yeah. And I think it's a really apt analogy. Like, whenever we're faced with a situation where we do not have the resources, the training, the competencies, the skills, the other support systems to do the job that we're being asked to do, that can be a very stressful situation. And so we often have to do things that put more pressure on us. Would have been way easier just to back that thing in with the tractor. Right. But I had to put more pressure on myself to push it in to the barn. Right. Now, if that's the case, as Alexander Robbins has argued, if that's true, then maybe AI isn't the solution. Maybe AI is the equivalent of me taking that wagon off the tractor and trying to push it in under my own strength. In other words, we're not really fixing the problem. We're just addressing a little symptom. The real solution would be for somebody to show me how to back a tractor, you know, back a wagon in with a tractor, which I still don't know how to do. But it's unfeasible for me to think that if I had 10 wagons that I could push them all into the barn. It's just too physically taxing. Right. And so as we look at this issue, I think this is one of those areas where we're going to see AI sort of fixing, rewarding our own bad behavior. AI is going to allow us to continue to ignore public schools, continue to deprioritize them, continue to give lip service to how much we care for teachers without actually addressing the underlying problems that make their job that much harder. And, you know, some of the underlying problems that are inherent of the teaching profession are man-made, like the long-term problems of unionization and tenure and those pressures and the outcomes of what happens when we have a society that instead of individuals being called into vocational work, has increasingly fallen into the trap of occupying space and time. How could AI change that perspective? Well, I think the difficulty is that AI isn't actually built to change that perspective. Right. So if you think about it, the bigger problems that many professions face, and I would say, you know, having been in higher ed for a lot of years, I would say bureaucracy is one of those big problems. It's the decision-making process. It's the 15 approvals you have to get before you do one thing. It's the, you know, it's the political environment in which you work. Well, AI may be able to take away some of the, you know, forms that I have to fill out. AI may be able to, you know, navigate or make more efficient communications. But honestly, it's not built to fix human systems. It's fixed to be a technological stopgap. That's what they are. Now, obviously, I think that AI has a trajectory toward just eliminating humans altogether. And that would certainly solve many of the relational problems. And that would be my worry with something like that.

Educate. Yeah. I actually got on and used EducAid, and from what I saw, I came to sort of two conclusions. Number one, I'm not exactly sure that as we move into, you know, more and more robust AIs that could take, you know, develop a lesson plan, create a syllabus, build AI videos with AI teachers and appropriately accurate content, why exactly then do we need teachers at all? And then I took it a step further and said, it really goes beyond that. Why do we need to learn anything? Wow. Because this is all so easy to get, and it's all out there. We've already seen sort of a move toward our quote-unquote outboard brain, right, which is our smartphones. And anything we don't know, we just look up. Yeah. Well, maybe education changes so that we don't really need to know that much. We just need to be really good at querying our systems. Hmm. But that could be said about the dictionary, you know, or a lot of other things. If you know where to look it up, you know, you can learn from those things, but it doesn't teach you and it doesn't have you experience something, right? It could be. It could certainly be said about a dictionary, and this is an argument that people have been making since, you know... Since the dictionary. Well, I mean, Socrates made it whenever books were first being produced. He was against printed writing because he felt that people would stop memorizing things. And to some degree, he was right. The real difference here, I think, is the way that AI acts back on us and really does change the way that we end up relating to each other in the world. It relegates us to a position where we are no longer particularly necessary for most of the jobs that exist out there today. And so I think that one of the things we're not really reckoning with is, you know, do I believe that... Would I love for my kids to have human teachers? Absolutely. I really don't want my kids learning from artificial intelligence ever. As strange as some of the teachers my kids, you know, have had in the past have been, I'd take them all day over an artificial intelligence model. But at the same time, I think that while viewing it from that angle is important, we also need to view it from a different angle where these teachers who are currently educating students gain a sense of meaning and purpose out of that act. And to the extent that AI can help them, you know, sort of maybe make some of their work a little bit more efficient, great. But at the same time, I think that as a society, as school boards and organizations, as boards in higher education, I think it's the responsibility of people in charge, people who care about these things, to make sure that these systems are set up so that they aren't just leaning back on technological solutions constantly, but that they're actually fixing what's wrong with the organizations. And I would say, again, based on my time in higher ed, there were certainly times when we needed a technological solution. But I would say there were fewer and further between than most people might think. Many times what we were dealing with were human resource problems. We were dealing with, you know, infrastructure problems. We were dealing with just decision-making problems, like who makes what decision. We were dealing with cultural issues. And so I think that AI can work within a narrow scope of technology problems, but it shouldn't be our go-to fix for everything. Right. So we get back to your favorite film analogy, WALL-E. These people can't move and they don't know what hit them. They don't seem to know anyhow. While we are right to be concerned with the state of education, don't Christians need to consider how AI adoption may cover up similar problems in the church? I mean, I think we absolutely have to be aware of this. The teaching problem in Canada that we've been discussing, I think, is mirrored in much of what we're seeing in the church. There is a sense in which I think people have become more and more okay with pastors using technology and increasingly artificial intelligence to study for and or create their messages. And you look at that and you say, well, the pastor's got a big job to do. And so he needs to be efficient somewhere. It seems like study, if these things can provide him with the information he needs to craft a sermon, that's great. The odd part of that is, is that there have been past studies that have demonstrated that the more effective churches, their pastors actually spend 22 hours a week in sermon preparation versus the less effective churches that their pastors only spend about four hours. Now, if we just look at that statistic, and I know it's difficult to sort of isolate any one statistic and then draw a conclusion, but just follow the logic for the moment. We're essentially building AI models to make something that is actually making a church more effective. We're trying to curtail the amount of time that pastors spend in study by making it more efficient and allowing that quote unquote burden to be carried by artificial intelligence. Even though there's evidence to suggest that spending more time in sermon preparation each week actually makes a church more effective. Right. Completely off. You know, AI is not now solving a problem that we actually have. We're we're actually allowing it to become a bigger part of the problem potentially. Or create a problem. Yeah. Or create a problem. And so it comes down in my mind to a couple of things. Number one, we need to really deeply understand these problems. You know, what is actually creating the issues in our churches? That's one. If a pastor spending 22 hours in sermon preparation each week is a good thing for a church, then we need to be cultivating toward that. Right. If, you know, if our pastor is so overloaded that he can't spend those 22 hours a week in sermon preparation, I don't see that it's really helpful for an AI model to make his sermon preparation that much faster. But we need our solutions around the edges to make sure that pastors aren't spending too much time in pastoral care. Maybe some of that's farmed out to elders. You know, making sure that pastors aren't spending time, for instance, fixing the church, which again, the same study that had the the hours of time spent in sermon preparation talked about the number of hours less effective church pastors actually spend doing maintenance on the church buildings. Huh. And so we've just got to be thinking through what the pastoral role needs to be before we just insert artificial intelligence into this conversation as if it's a solution. Because we don't understand the problem. And so, yes, I think this is absolutely the, the analogy to the teachers in Canada using EdgAid because they need a break and they're feeling burnt out is, I think, one-to-one with what we're seeing in a lot of churches. Pastors need more help, but they need more help in very specific areas. They don't need to simply become more efficient in a given area so that no one else feels the pain and the pastor does exactly what the congregation expects. Well, James Taylor sang in a song, the church bells still ring on a Sunday. Old folks still go. Young ones listen on the radio. The Taylor's form of technology has changed. We get the message. As the old folks are dying out and there is a pastor shortage, are we in danger of going to church on social media with digital shepherds caring for a digital flock? I hope not. It certainly seems that it could begin moving that way. I think that there's a real challenge here where we're seeing the shrinkage of churches, the blinking out of existence of certain churches, and the need for churches to sort of merge together and maybe do video pastors, maybe do a different sort of church structure. But I don't know that I really see any of this working in social media or with a digital shepherd caring for a digital flock. I know there are ministries that are using social media, that they're using more of a digital ministry model. And I've seen that. I've seen their arguments for it. I just don't, maybe it's a personal preference. I'd be willing to admit that I don't like the idea of just going to church online, but I'd like to think that, you know, as we consider this, there are real dangers to a digital church environment that just...

being thought through. And one of those, I would argue, is the notion of local ministry. You know, if you think about the creation of cars and mass transit and the ability to go fairly long distances in a relatively short amount of time for less effort and less money, that has allowed us to be fairly transient churchgoers. We can move from church to church if we get in trouble at one church, we don't like the preaching, you know, we disagree with something, whatever. We can leave that church at the drop of a hat and drive to another one across town, and nobody will really know the difference because the level of anonymity that we have in larger communities beyond, let's say, 150 to 250 people is really quite large. We just, people don't know us. And so those social connections and the sort of accountability that comes at the local level is lost as we've created mechanisms for ourselves to move from congregation to congregation. If we take that as just an example of what can happen with digital ministry, we could see a very similar thing. If there isn't a local connection, what happens when I don't come to digital church? Does somebody send me an email? Do they shoot me a text? You know, having been involved in higher ed recruitment, I can tell you, you know, the response rates to texts and emails from students who have requested information from your institution is actually pretty low. There's nobody who says that I, there's no reason that I have to respond to an email or respond to a text. And so one way communication and even two-way communication, again, I, you know, I grew up in, in online education, so I, I know the power that you can have. You can really develop a strong community online. That's not what I'm arguing, but my point is that that strong community is normally conditioned on something. And so in a, in a formal classroom with a discussion board, there's a grade involved, right? Students are supposed to do this. There's a grade, a grading element to it. And so they do it. But then there's a whole other side of this where, what if there isn't a conviction to participate? And I just tend to think that that's where the digital ministry side of this goes. So my hope is that we don't fall prey to, you know, going online or fully online with all of this and that those of us who have the capability to connect locally do so. So there are people who will say, like, like there was a guy who told me when I went back to school for journalism, that that's an evil profession. AI, and yes, in some ways he was right. We know that. But, but it wasn't the profession that was evil. It was, it was the thing that we made it that got evil. That AI is now the devil who is spelling out the details. Is that, is that what, is AI getting blamed now for just about every, everything that's happening that's wrong with, with any profession or it, it sounds like AI is getting demonized. Is that, is that something? Well, that's not what I'm trying to say. Here's what I would say. You know, we've been through a lot of years where we blamed the internet for the increase in pornography or you know, the social distance that we've gotten from each other, the mean language, the mean things that we say to each other online on social media platforms. Social media platforms have been the mechanism through which humans, companies, people who have, you know, created these platforms have engaged in certain behavior modification. But notice it's the people behind it that are always the problem. And honestly, it's not just the people who are behind it. It's the people who are in front of it. These are our choices. We're making them. And so when we look at this and we say, well, maybe those teachers shouldn't adopt AI. That's fair to say as long as we also say they shouldn't adopt AI because we have other problems and we need to coordinate to solve them. You don't want your pastor to write an AI sermon. That is not an AI problem. That's a congregational problem. Right. And your congregation needs to figure that out and make sure that your pastor has enough time to do sermon preparation without the help of AI. If that's a conviction you hold, hold it. Don't just say it. But I think that basically as we demonize AI, what we're really doing is we're making yet another excuse for ourselves not to act, not to fix the underlying problems. And that's where I see the real difficulty with AI coming in. It's very similar to what we've done with social media. Right. I mean, I, we run the Go Dark Shine Bright campaign at the D.L. Moody Center. You know, we've had 75,000 people take a social media fast across 10 days. Right. And the point of that is to say, you don't actually need this. It's not an essential part of your life. Go do something else. Go revive community somewhere else. And I would say the same thing with AI. AI is becoming more pervasive. It's going to be much more difficult to avoid. But where we can avoid it, I think we should really think about avoiding it. And when I say that, I don't mean to suggest that AI is the devil. Right. Not at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is that AI is not going to be the solution. It is not a technological savior that will redeem all of our problems. When it can work, when it has utility, when it when it will actually fix a problem, I think it's appropriate to use. That's me saying I don't think it's the devil. Right. At the same time, if all we do is default to it, I think we are taking it way easier on easier on ourselves than we should. Right. Well, that's a good way of thinking, Christian James. And you've got some useful resources for people. How do they keep in touch with your writings and media? Well, they can go to Moody center.org and find a lot of what we're doing at the D.L. Moody Center, which I have served as president. But they can also go to my personal website, James G. Spencer dot com. And that's James G. Spencer dot com. And they can find all the different links to the interviews that I'm doing and the op-eds that I'm publishing. And so they can check us out there. Finding uplifting news in today's headlines is often like searching for a needle in a haystack. At the story behind podcast, we believe in the power of finding heartwarming tales and are happy to share empowering stories with you every week. Get inspired by the note a waitress received from a patron dining alone and even hear about how one VIP passenger made a hardworking pilot get emotional before his flight. To start listening to the story behind podcast, visit life audio dot com.