The formation of a thinking person is a moral and spiritual calling, not merely an academic credential. This conviction shapes everything about how I design a course, conduct a class, and evaluate a student's work.
The Problem Education Is Not Naming
There is a crisis in education that most institutions are not naming clearly. It is not a funding crisis, a technology crisis, or a curriculum crisis. It is a formation crisis. We are producing graduates who can access anything and evaluate almost nothing. We are credentialing students who have never been required to demonstrate that the thinking behind their work is genuinely their own. And we have allowed a generation of extraordinary young people to reach adulthood without developing the most essential human capacity God gave them: the ability to reason.
Current research documents what serious educators already observe. Students who delegate intellectual work to external tools show measurable declines in analytical reasoning — a pattern researchers now identify as cognitive offloading. The more specific concern is what scholars call metacognitive laziness: learners who become dependent on tools progressively lose not just the habit of thinking, but the confidence that they can think at all. Generation Z students already show significantly higher rates of attentional difficulty than previous generations, linked to chronic digital multitasking and the fragmentation of sustained thought. Randomized controlled trials now provide causal evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance when the tool is removed.
This is not a technology problem. It is an old problem wearing new clothes. Every generation finds ways to do the thinking with something other than its own mind. What is different now is the scale, the speed, and the invisibility of the abdication. My obligation as an educator is to name it, and to build classrooms that counter it.
The Direction Is the Work
When I ask a student to use any tool — AI or otherwise — I am not asking for the output the tool produces. I am asking for the direction behind it. The reason is straightforward: in an age when any output can be generated automatically, the educational value of generating outputs is no longer in the output itself. It is in the quality of the direction, the clarity of the brief, the rigor of the evaluation, and the integrity of the revision.
A sophisticated, well-reasoned, carefully refined prompt or creative brief is direct evidence of what a student understands. A generic, unexamined one is equally direct evidence of what they do not. The tool has made the invisible visible: intellectual capacity now reveals itself in the quality of the question asked and the standards applied to judge the answer. This is not a workaround for an inconvenient technology. It is a better form of assessment than most of what preceded it.
I ask my students to show me the thinking. The product follows from the person.
What I Am Actually Teaching
Across every course I teach — whether in music technology, worship studies, or ministerial formation — the underlying curriculum is consistent: how to think clearly about a complex problem, how to establish the criteria by which a solution will be judged before attempting it, how to evaluate what has been produced against those criteria, and how to improve it.
These are not skills that belong to any single discipline. They are the cognitive and spiritual capacities that allow a worship leader to discern what belongs in a congregation's mouth, allow a producer to know when a track serves the song and when it serves the ego, and allow a minister to know when to speak and when to listen. They are what the classical tradition called practical wisdom — the ability to apply right thinking to real situations with real consequences.
My courses are organized around three questions I want every student to be able to answer before they leave:
What are you actually trying to accomplish? Most failure in creative and scholarly work begins with an underspecified goal. Students who cannot articulate precisely what they are trying to achieve will not achieve it, with or without tools. Clarity of purpose is the first discipline.
How will you know if it worked? Critical evaluation is not a feeling. It is a standard, applied consistently. I ask students to establish their evaluative criteria before they begin, not after. This single practice changes the quality of everything that follows.
What did you learn from what went wrong? Iteration is the engine of mastery. I build failure into the process deliberately, because the response to failure is where learning actually lives. A student who cannot articulate what failed and why has not yet begun to learn from the experience.
The Encouragement Within the Demand
I am demanding with students not because I am indifferent to the difficulties of their generation — I see those difficulties clearly, and I take them seriously — but because I am committed to what they are capable of. The gap between what students can produce with tools and what they can produce without them is not a measure of the tools. It is a measure of the formation that preceded them. My job is to close that gap.
The students who have risen to these expectations consistently describe the experience the same way: they say it was the first time they felt their mind actually working. That is not a small thing. That is the beginning of wisdom.
The Christian Foundation
Christian education, at its best, has always understood that the development of the mind is an act of worship. To think carefully, to reason rigorously, to evaluate honestly, to acknowledge error and revise — these are not secular virtues that the Church has borrowed from elsewhere. They flow from the conviction that truth is real, that it can be known, and that the God who made us in His image expects us to use the minds He gave us.
The formation of a student is the formation of a person made in the image of God. That framing changes what education is for. It is not preparation for a credential. It is preparation for a life lived with integrity, clarity, and purpose. I teach with that weight and with that hope.