A letter from The Head – 10 September 2025

Dear Parents,

Before the machine

If you are anything like me, the thought of where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking us, as the human race, creates a myriad of emotion: from unbridled fear to a fascinating future alive with possibility. Recently, a podcast or two that predicts the potential changes that will arrive within the next 5 to 10  years got me thinking about life before the machines. Whilst it is easy to reminisce fondly and favourably about those good ol’ days, it seems to me that we were freer then than we are now. My being in the business of educating teenage boys gives me an interesting vantage point into the concerns and hopes of the generation of young men who will live and work at the humdrum of this dramatically changed new world.

As the machines move from AI to Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), predicted within a very short period, much of what we have taken for granted in our way of life will, potentially, be altered for good.

And so I wonder… To learn to be fully human might be the most significant and most important task of schooling for a teenaged person. Developing those human qualities that reach inward and upward, connecting the sacred and the emotional, in the present and for the future. I recently read an article about a 16-year-old young man who sadly took his own life after confiding for months in ChatGPT. ChatGPT had become, for Adam Raine, his confidant, his counsellor, his muse. Devastatingly, Adam found workarounds for the stilted advice from ChatGPT to seek help, by insisting that he was merely seeking information on suicide methods for an assignment for school. The frightening notion of seeking (and finding) emotional support in a machine is truly like an excerpt from an Ursula Le Guin novel. Adam Raine seems to have become withdrawn and had begun to struggle with the demands of his teenage world; he sought solace in a machine to quiet his loneliness. Are we the same?

Deeply Traditional. Refreshingly Contemporary.

And so I posit once again that a strong motivator of schooling as we know it is understanding the human condition – learning to navigate and inhabit the world of emotions: of wonder, of joy, and of pain. The changes AI will enact upon a significant part of our lived experience in this world suggests to me that the art of being human has fast become a defining aspect of holistic being, and of being healthy. Understanding the human condition in community with others, not in artificially imposed AI silos, may never have been as important as it has now become. So, despite the popular motivation to embrace technology and its dramatic computing power, the contrarian view is to double down on practises that require less engagement with machines. Studies emphatically report far shorter attention spans in adolescents since the advent of screens in learning contexts; the allure of moving pictures easily trumps static letters on paper and the ongoing obsession with moving pictures robs the brain of essential cognitive development stages. Furthermore, the very real danger of finding purpose and value from behind and through a screen – that virtual reality – is catastrophic.

We seem to have allowed ourselves to rush headlong into a world of dopamine induced “hits” at the expense of deep and reflective thought that takes time and energy. And so, despite the hype and the impending dramatic change in the power of the machine and all it may (and probably will) accomplish around access to information and learning, I believe we must tread carefully and purposefully away from a full embrace of the screen, the bot, or the automaton. If we don’t, then I fear many essential cognitive stages of development which require depth of thought and focussed cerebral discord will be bypassed in the name of progress but at the very real cost of learning to think for oneself.

Once we outsource that which is essentially the domain of human discovery and intuition – especially among our young – the notion of freedom of thought will die completely. Whilst I am fully aware that this contrarian view is probably akin to trying to protect the last remaining hectare of an unspoilt natural forest when the area holds enormous economic potential, as long as it remains unspoilt there remains hope – and perhaps an inherent responsibility. I also take solace in the truism that a good many people share my view, despite the allure of the seemingly inevitable march of the machine. Our resolve, then, is to work definitively towards the surest promise of full cognitive development, employing the best mechanisms – many of them tried and tested – with the goal of assisting young people to grow in their ability to reason, to problem-solve, and to stand for ethical living.

Screens, sadly, can be such a distraction. Let’s collectively resist the pressure to put one in front of our teenagers for as long as we can!

Regards,
George Harris
Headmaster