St. John’s College Preserved How to Think in the AI Era
Artificial intelligence may force higher education to rediscover why slow reading, difficult conversation, and intellectual discipline mattered in the first place.
Artificial intelligence is forcing higher education into an uncomfortable question. If large language models can summarize books, draft essays, answer technical questions, and generate polished prose in seconds, what exactly remains uniquely human about education?
A new Chronicle of Higher Education feature on St. John’s College offers one possible answer. The article describes a place that appears almost out of time within modern higher education: students reading Homer, Euclid, Newton, Darwin, and Nietzsche around wooden seminar tables without laptops, PowerPoints, or lecture halls dominating the experience.
At first glance, the model can seem impractical or even economically inefficient. St. John’s maintains a curriculum built around difficult texts, small discussions, sustained reading, mathematics, laboratory science, and intellectual confrontation rather than specialization or professional training. Students often struggle during their first months because the institution asks them to do something many educational systems increasingly avoid: think publicly under pressure.
Yet the Chronicle article also reveals why that model may become more relevant as AI systems improve.
For decades, higher education optimized for scale, flexibility, convenience, and career alignment. Universities expanded online offerings, modularized learning, streamlined curricular paths, and increasingly treated education as an accessible service platform. Many of those changes were understandable responses to economic pressure and student demand. Broader access mattered. Workforce preparation mattered. Flexibility mattered.
At the same time, an unintended shift occurred. Education increasingly became associated with information transfer and credential acquisition rather than intellectual formation. Students learned how to locate information, complete assignments, and navigate systems efficiently. Far fewer institutions consistently cultivated the slower habits associated with deep intellectual engagement: sustained reading, disciplined argument, patient listening, and comfort with unresolved questions.
AI accelerates that tension dramatically.
Large language models now compress information at extraordinary speed. Students can generate summaries of Plato before breakfast, synthesize scientific articles in minutes, and produce competent first drafts almost instantly. The modern university, already moving toward informational efficiency, suddenly faces technologies capable of delivering that efficiency far more effectively than traditional classroom structures.
St. John’s implicitly operates on a different assumption about learning.
What exactly is critical thinking, and can it actually be taught? Modern higher education frequently invokes the phrase, yet institutions rarely define the process by which students genuinely acquire it. Critical thinking is not merely skepticism, intelligence, or the ability to criticize ideas. It is a disciplined habit of mind involving sustained attention, careful reading, logical analysis, intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity, evidence-based argument, and the willingness to revise one’s position after encountering stronger reasoning.
Those habits rarely emerge through memorization alone. Students develop them slowly through repeated exposure to difficult conversations, unresolved questions, and environments where ideas must be articulated publicly and defended in real time. The seminar itself becomes the pedagogy.
One student quoted in the Chronicle article captures the intellectual culture succinctly: “You can’t hide here.” That observation explains much of what makes the model distinctive. Seminar discussion demands attention, participation, preparation, and intellectual vulnerability. Students cannot disappear anonymously into the back row of a lecture hall or rely entirely on passive consumption. They must think aloud, test interpretations publicly, and confront disagreement directly.
McDowell Hall at St. John’s College, Annapolis, circa 2005. Photograph by Doukinosakura via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Students at St. John’s are not merely expected to absorb conclusions. They wrestle with uncertainty, contradiction, disagreement, mathematics, philosophy, science, and interpretation directly with other people around the table. Learning occurs socially as much as intellectually.
Several students interviewed in the Chronicle piece describe arriving academically successful yet intellectually unprepared for that environment. Some initially interpreted disagreement as personal criticism because previous educational systems rewarded correctness and performance more than inquiry. Over time, many learned that rigorous disagreement could function as a form of respect. A challenged argument became an invitation to think more carefully rather than a signal of failure.
That distinction may become increasingly important in the AI era.
Large language models can already imitate many external signs of critical thinking. They can generate structured arguments, summarize opposing viewpoints, and produce persuasive prose with remarkable fluency. Yet imitation is not identical to intellectual formation. Students may increasingly outsource the appearance of reasoning without developing the internal habits that genuine reasoning requires.
Machines can generate answers with growing sophistication. Human value may increasingly reside elsewhere: asking better questions, recognizing weak assumptions, integrating ideas across disciplines, exercising judgment under uncertainty, and navigating difficult conversations where no single correct answer exists.
Those capacities remain difficult to automate because they emerge socially and developmentally rather than computationally. They require ambiguity, patience, dialogue, and intellectual friction.
The Chronicle article repeatedly returns to one central feature of St. John’s culture: conversation. Discussion extends beyond the classroom into dormitories, coffee tables, reading groups, and informal gatherings. Education becomes less transactional and more communal. Students do not simply consume content. They participate in an ongoing argument about truth, meaning, science, politics, ethics, and human nature.
Ironically, that older educational structure may align unusually well with the future.
The more AI systems excel at rapid synthesis and information retrieval, the more valuable deeply human intellectual capacities may become. Reading slowly. Listening carefully. Revising one’s position. Defending an interpretation without certainty. Thinking across centuries rather than reacting to a feed. Remaining intellectually present in a room full of disagreement.
None of this means every college should become St. John’s College. Modern universities serve many essential purposes that a small Great Books institution cannot fully replicate. Research universities, technical programs, professional schools, and large public institutions remain indispensable to society.
Still, the Chronicle feature points toward an important possibility. Colleges that preserved rigorous conversation, deep reading, and intellectual community may possess a strategic advantage that few anticipated even a decade ago.
For years, institutions like St. John’s were often described as eccentric, difficult, or resistant to modern educational trends. The AI era may force a reconsideration. What appeared inefficient may instead represent the preservation of capacities that technological systems cannot easily reproduce.
Higher education spent decades trying to make learning faster, smoother, and more efficient. Artificial intelligence may ultimately reveal that the slower and more difficult parts of education were never inefficiencies at all.
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