Gracious reader,
Here is a scene playing out on campuses across the country. A student asks a machine to write her paper. Her professor asks a machine to grade it. The paper is submitted, assessed, and returned, and no human being has learned anything.
We like to say artificial intelligence is disrupting education. I think it is doing something more useful. It is exposing a form of education that had already become a transaction, and in too many places, a farce.
So what does it look like to be human in the age of the machine? Today I want to show you what one university built, let you hear from the professor who built it, and give you a free first-year curriculum any campus can use to build it too.
What education is for
Our word "education" comes from the Latin educere, "to bring out, lead forth." The Greeks called it paideia. The Romans called it humanitas, the root of our word "humanities." Its aim was never information. It was formation: freeing us from our baser nature and bringing forth what is best and noble in us.
"In liberating us from our ignoble instincts, liberal arts enable us to become more fully human, and more humane." — The Soul of Civility, p. 313
The university was meant to be the home of that formation. The word comes from the Latin universitas: a whole, a corporate body. The first universities were communities of masters and students, intellectual companions learning and building together.
A machine can produce a paper. It cannot become more humane. That part is still ours.
The gift of being human
Today I tried to explain artificial intelligence to my son, Percy. I told him it's smart, but it isn't human intelligence. It's something different.
Here is how I'd put it to you. Artificial intelligence is a system trained on an enormous library of human words and images. It learns the patterns in what we have written and predicts what is likely to come next. It can be astonishingly useful. But it is pattern without a person behind it. It does not wonder or love. It cannot choose to forgive. It will never sit across the table from someone it disagrees with and decide to see them again.
The ancients described a ladder of being. A rock simply exists. A plant lives and grows. An animal senses, moves, and desires. A human being does all of this and more: we reason, we love, we choose, and we ask why we are here. The Hebrew scriptures put it most beautifully: we are made in the image of God, the imago Dei. There is a spark of the divine in every person. We are not rocks or plants, not animals, and not computers. That spark is the root of the dignity at the heart of my book. Every person you meet is “a miracle of life, a person with irreducible dignity and worth.”
This is why the humanities exist. When Cicero wrote of humanitas, he meant the cultivation of what is most fully human in us, our reason and our fellow-feeling. The Renaissance humanists revived that study, the studia humanitatis, because they believed a person must be formed, not merely informed. As I write in the book, “Being human means being fit for life with others, which requires that we cultivate our humaneness.”
A machine can imitate our words. It cannot receive the gift of being human, and it cannot give it. That gift is ours, in ourselves and in one another. In an age of brilliant machines, the answer is not to compete with them on their terms. It is to double down on what makes us human, and to help our students do the same.
What St. Ambrose built
Last month, I told you about a professor at St. Ambrose University who wrote to invite me to speak. Buried in his note was something more interesting: he hoped to make The Soul of Civility the lynchpin of a new core course on civil discourse.
This fall, Dr. Joseph Hebert is teaching that course, Civil Discourse & Civil Society. The whole semester turns on one question: How does engagement in civil discourse help me grow as a person and member of my community? A few things about his design that any educator can borrow:
It starts with definitions. Students learn to distinguish civility from politeness, flattery, or evasiveness.
The book sits beside the classics. Students read The Soul of Civility alongside Federalist Nos. 10 and 51, Tocqueville, and Robert Putnam.
Much of it happens out loud. The class chooses one public issue with a range of reasonable views. Five practice deliberations build to a public deliberation in December, where the goal is mutual understanding, not victory.
Then Joseph went further. He became a Civic Renaissance Ambassador and gathered a cohort of colleagues and community members to carry these ideas across the university. In September, I joined them for lunch, a public lecture, and a panel of people already putting the book into practice. That is a universitas: a whole community, learning together.
At the top of this post is my full conversation with Joseph: how he built the course, what he asks of his students, and what he is seeing in the room. If you teach or lead a campus, I hope you'll listen.
A free first-year curriculum for any campus
Since that visit, professors, deans, and parents have asked me the same question: Could we do this here?
So I built a first-year curriculum on The Soul of Civility, for a first-year seminar or orientation, and I'm giving it away. Take it, adapt it, and teach it.
It is built for the age of the machine, and it forms the whole person: head, heart, and hands. Every grade is earned out loud, in the room, through the oldest tools of teaching: Socratic seminar, disputation, recitation, role-play, and the oral exam. Students mark up their own copy of the book and keep a handwritten commonplace book. Nothing can be handed off to AI. And it's fun. A few things students do:
Play the villain. A student defends Gilgamesh, or a polished con artist, in character while the class questions them. Then the class unbundles them: what good was buried in there?
Put Thomas Jefferson on trial, with Edward Coles as a witness. Hero or villain? The verdict is almost always both.
Practice unoffendability. For one week, students answer every slight with kindness, the way my Grandma Margaret did, and report what changed.
Teach it forward. Students read stories from my children's collection, Heroes and Villains, to local schoolchildren.
Host a porch. For the final project, students host a gathering on their floor for people who wouldn't otherwise sit together. A dorm room counts as a porch.
The curriculum rests on three companions, one for each part of the person. The book is for the head. The Soul of Civility Commonplace Book is for the heart: students copy by hand the passages that move them and carry them into seminar. And The Soul of Civility Workbook is for the hands, with a practice for every chapter. The book is all you need to begin. The commonplace book and workbook are coming soon, and the three together will serve workplaces, congregations, and reading groups, too.
Why practices instead of papers? Because, as I write in the education chapter:
"Educators can be tempted to focus on politeness at the expense of civility. It's easy to have the rules on posters on the wall, and to have students memorize lists of dos and don'ts." — The Soul of Civility, p. 325
Rules can't form a disposition. Habits can, and habits are formed in community, face to face.
Get the free first-year curriculum here: alexandraohudson.com/higher-education.
Let's build it together
I would love to partner with you to bring this to your campus.
If you're a dean or lead first-year programs, let's build it into your orientation or first-year experience together. I can visit, train your instructors, help you form a Civic Renaissance Ambassador cohort, and create a custom edition for your incoming class.
If you're a professor, take the curriculum and teach it, in full or one week at a time, and tell me what you build. I'd love to come alongside you.
If you're a parent of a college student, or a student yourself, forward this to a dean or professor on your campus. There's a ready-to-send note at the end of the curriculum.
Just reply to this email, and let's start building. Class sets of the book are at alexandraohudson.com/order.
Will you porch with us?
If you're reading The Soul of Civility in your classroom, your congregation, your book club, or your living room, join the Porching Challenge. Choose your place. Invite your people. Decide who hosts next. (For students, hosting a porch is the final project in the curriculum.)
Nearly 40 porchers across nine states, Canada, and Australia have already said yes. See them on the Porching Map, and I'll connect you with porchers in your community.
Ready to get started? Join the Porching Challenge here. It’s free: the toolkit gifts you the introduction and first two chapters for your first three gatherings, plus guides and invitation scripts. Let’s porch.
"Because civility can be learned, it is open to anyone." — The Soul of Civility, p. 311
With gratitude,
Lexi
