ACSI Research Fellow Program

It’s 10:15 on a Tuesday morning, and already you’re thinking about technology. 

The Grade 8s are in the bathroom on their phones again. 

Ms. Wilson stopped you in the hallway. She’s exhausted from policing devices and trying to compete for her students’ attention. 

Another teacher wants to know what to do about the assignment that was clearly written by ChatGPT. Is it cheating? Is it assistance? How can she even tell anymore? 

Yesterday, a parent emailed because her daughter has been spending hours talking to an AI chatbot. She wants to know what the school thinks. 

And that technology policy your team spent months developing? It already feels out of date. 

These are the very real challenges facing school leaders right now. 

But even as schools work to address them, a new generation of technologies is already emerging. Artificial intelligence is becoming more conversational and personalized. Smart glasses can discreetly record the world around us. Brain-computer interfaces are moving from science fiction into human trials. 

Which raises a much bigger question: How do we form students not simply to navigate the technologies of today, but to live wisely and faithfully in the digital world ahead? 
 

Preparing for the Future of Technology 

Technology is changing faster than schools can write policies for it. 

One year, we’re debating smartphones in classrooms. Next, we’re developing guidelines for generative AI. Before those practices are fully established, something new arrives with a new set of possibilities and ethical questions. 

For school leaders, it can feel like a never-ending game of catch-up. And that’s the problem. 

If our primary approach is reactive—waiting for a technology to disrupt our classrooms and then creating a rule for it—we will always be one step behind. What if, instead of trying to prepare students for every new technology, we prepared them to meet any technology with wisdom? 

Christian schools have a unique opportunity to take a different approach: forming students with wisdom that can outlast any particular device. 
 

Asking More Than “Is It Good or Bad?” 

When a new technology arrives, our first instinct is often to ask: Is it good or bad? Should we allow it or ban it? 

Christian formation gives us better questions. 

What is this technology asking us to love? What habits is it forming in us? What might it make easier and what might we lose in exchange? Does it help us become more attentive to God and one another, or less? 

Augustine’s concept of “ordered loves” offers a helpful framework. He understood that our lives are shaped not simply by what we know, but by what we love and whether those loves are rightly ordered. 

Technology can be a wonderful expression of God-given human creativity. But when convenience, entertainment, efficiency, or even productivity begin to displace God, community, embodied relationships, meaningful work, and rest, our loves can become disordered. 

This gives Christian educators a richer way to evaluate technology, not simply by asking what a tool can do, but by considering what its use is forming us to become. 

This is also why Christian digital formation needs to move from values to virtues. Values help students identify what matters; virtues are the habits of character that help them live accordingly. The goal isn't simply to teach students to value wisdom, attention, or love, but to give them opportunities to practice becoming wise, attentive, and loving people. 
 

Practicing Discernment Now 

The concern with AI isn't simply whether it gives students inaccurate information or makes cheating easier. We also need to ask what happens when students begin outsourcing the very processes through which wisdom develops. 

Learning requires curiosity, struggle, conversation, and perseverance. Sometimes the struggle itself is the point. Wrestling with an idea, sitting with uncertainty, finding the words to express what we think, listening to someone who sees the world differently—these experiences form us. 

As Paul Matthews, author of Wise AI, has often reminded educators, formation is not something that happens to students in spite of their effort but through their effort. When we remove the struggle, we risk removing the very conditions in which maturity is formed. 

So before asking, Could AI do this for my students?, we should also ask: What does doing this themselves develop in them? 

The same is true beyond the classroom. Formation has always happened through relationships—with parents, teachers, friends, churches, and communities. As AI companions become increasingly capable of offering personalized conversation, emotional reassurance, and even ethical guidance, young people will need the wisdom to discern not simply whether an answer is helpful, but who and what they are allowing to shape them. 

Smart glasses raise different questions. As recording becomes increasingly invisible, young people are entering a world where they may not always know when their words or actions are being captured. Yet human beings need spaces where we can make mistakes, ask foolish questions, repent, reconcile, grow, and become someone new without every imperfect moment becoming part of a permanent digital record. 

These aren't reasons to fear emerging technology. They are reasons to practice discernment before the next technology arrives. 

A Phone-Free Classroom Is Only the Beginning 

Good policies matter. They establish boundaries and create conditions where learning and relationships can flourish. But policy alone cannot form students. A phone-free classroom creates space. The deeper question is what fills it. 

Conversation. Wonder. Creativity. Prayer. Deep work. Friendship. Adults who model what it looks like to give another person their full attention. 

Digital flourishing isn't primarily about helping students avoid harmful technologies. It's about helping them become the kind of people who can use any technology wisely. 

Students need opportunities to experience boredom without immediately escaping it, solve problems without outsourcing when it becomes challenging, create rather than endlessly consume, and engage in face-to-face conversation.