Santiago Schnell, provost of Dartmouth College, contributed a commentary to the National Catholic Register (April 13, 2026) arguing that artificial intelligence, for all its utility, cannot replace authentic education because the end of learning is not the production of words but the formation of a person capable of truth, judgment, and responsibility. Schnell invokes John Milton’s 1644 tract Of Education, which defined the purpose of learning as “to repair the ruines of our first Parents,” and contends that AI industrializes an old pedagogical error: the confusion of verbal fluency for genuine understanding. He calls for pedagogical redesign — more in-class writing, oral defense, seminars, laboratory work — and urges transparency when students use AI tools. The commentary concludes with a theological flourish, quoting Milton’s deeper claim that the end of learning is “to know God aright, to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him,” and that “no machine will ever repair those ruins.”
The Sound of Catholic Language Without Catholic Substance
On first reading, Schnell’s commentary appears to be a commendable defense of authentic education against the encroachments of technology. He writes with evident erudition, quotes Milton with apparent sympathy, and even gestures toward a supernatural end of education. Yet a careful examination reveals that this article, published in a portal that has long served as a mouthpiece for the conciliar sect, operates entirely within the framework of the very Modernism that has laid waste to Catholic education for over six decades. Schnell’s argument, however eloquent, is constructed on a foundation of naturalistic humanism that implicitly denies the very truths it claims to affirm.
Consider the article’s central metaphor: Milton’s declaration that “the end then of Learning is to repair the ruines of our first Parents.” Schnell quotes this approvingly and even builds his entire argument around it. But what does this metaphor actually mean in Catholic theology? The “ruins of our first Parents” refer to the wounds of original sin — the darkening of the intellect, the weakening of the will, the disordering of the passions. The Catholic faith teaches that these wounds were healed not by education, not by human effort, but by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, applied principally through the sacraments. As the Council of Trent solemnly declared, the justification of the sinner is not by works but by grace through faith and the sacraments (Session VI, can. 1, 9, 30). Schnell’s entire framework, however, reduces the “repair of ruins” to a pedagogical project — the formation of “minds capable of real questions, careful judgment, and responsibility for truth.” This is Pelagianism dressed in academic robes.
The Omission That Condemns: Where Are the Sacraments?
The most damning feature of Schnell’s commentary is not what it says but what it fails to say. Nowhere in this extended meditation on education, formation, and the restoration of what sin has obscured does the author mention the sacraments. Not once. Not baptism, which regenerates the soul in grace. Not confession, which restores the soul after mortal sin. Not the Holy Eucharist, which is the very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the font of all sanctifying grace. Not confirmation, which strengthens the soul with the gifts of the Holy Ghost. The entire supernatural economy of salvation — the means by which God actually repairs the ruins of Adam — is simply absent.
This silence is not accidental. It is the hallmark of the post-conciliar mentality, which has systematically reduced Catholicism to a set of humanistic values, intellectual habits, and moral sentiments. When Schnell writes that “the restoration is finally God’s work before it is ours; yet, aided by grace, we must still undertake the human labor of attention, judgment and love,” he speaks of “grace” in the vaguest possible terms — as though grace were a kind of spiritual atmosphere rather than a specific, supernatural reality conferred through specific, identifiable channels established by Christ Himself. The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who says that grace is nothing but the free will’s own movement without any interior illumination of the Holy Spirit (Session VI, can. 4). Schnell’s language, however unintentionally, flirts precisely with this condemned position.
The Naturalistic Reduction of Catholic Education
Schnell writes that “education worthy of the name has always understood” that its end is “the formation of persons capable of judgment, attention and intellectual honesty.” He speaks of “genuine encounter with difficulty,” “the friction of a hard text,” “the resistance of a problem that does not yield quickly,” and “the discomfort of revising what one believed.” All of this is true as far as it goes — but it does not go nearly far enough. It describes natural formation, not supernatural transformation. It describes the cultivation of intellectual virtues, not the acquisition of theological virtues. It describes what any good secular university might aspire to produce, not what a Catholic institution is obligated to pursue.
The Catholic Church has always taught that the primary end of education is not intellectual formation but supernatural formation — the preparation of the soul for eternal life. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929), declared with unmistakable clarity: “The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian… the true Christian, the product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges, and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illuminated by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ.” Schnell’s article, by contrast, presents an education that culminates in “honest minds” and “careful judgment” — natural goods, to be sure, but hopelessly insufficient for a Catholic.
Furthermore, Pius XI explicitly condemned the naturalistic education that Schnell inadvertently champions: “It is therefore necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus, and textbooks in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal vigilance of the Church; so that the Faith, morals, and the whole of the curriculum may be truly permeated with the Christian spirit” (Divini Illius Magistri, §80). Schnell’s commentary, published in a nominally Catholic portal, makes no mention of the Church’s authority over education, the necessity of Catholic doctrine permeating every subject, or the obligation of Catholic schools to form students in the faith rather than merely in intellectual habits.
The Milton Quotation: A Protestant Framework Disguised as Catholic Wisdom
It is revealing that Schnell’s entire argument is built on a quotation from John Milton — a Protestant poet who denied the authority of the Catholic Church, rejected the episcopal structure of the Church of England, and advocated for divorce and freedom of the press in ways condemned by Catholic teaching. Milton’s Of Education was written in 1644, during the English Civil War, and reflects the Puritan conviction that individual study of Scripture, apart from the teaching authority of the Church, is sufficient for formation. That Schnell should build his Catholic argument on a Protestant foundation — and never once cite a papal encyclical, a conciliar document, or a Father of the Church — tells us everything about the theological poverty of the conciliar establishment’s intellectual life.
Where is Divini Illius Magistri, the greatest papal document on education ever written? Where is the Code of Canon Law (1917), which devotes an entire title (Canons 1372–1383) to the Church’s authority over Catholic schools? Where are the canons of the Council of Trent on the necessity of Catholic education? Where is St. Thomas Aquinas on the relation between faith and reason? Where is St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, which remains the foundational text on Catholic hermeneutics and pedagogy? Schnell cites none of these. He cites a Protestant poet and a contemporary biologist (Stuart Firestein) as his authorities. This is not Catholic education. This is secular education with a Catholic veneer.
The “Gift” of AI: A False Hope Built on a False Premise
Schnell concludes his commentary with what he calls AI’s “most unexpected gift”: that by industrializing the habit of rewarding performance over understanding, AI has “made old ones impossible to ignore” and may “force us to recover what education was always for.” This is a remarkably optimistic reading of a deeply troubling phenomenon. The habit of rewarding performance over understanding was not created by AI; it was created by the destruction of Catholic education in the twentieth century. The progressive abandonment of the Baltimore Catechism, the replacement of Thomistic philosophy with modernist phenomenology, the closure of Catholic schools and the transfer of their students to secular institutions, the capitulation of Catholic universities to secular accreditation standards — these are the true causes of the educational crisis Schnell describes.
And who was responsible for this destruction? The very conciliar establishment that Schnell’s portal serves. The “Spirit of Vatican II” — that nebulous, modernist slogan condemned in essence by every pope from St. Pius X to Benedict XVI (before his own capitulation) — is the root cause of the educational catastrophe that Schnell now laments. The conciliar sect replaced the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized “liturgy,” replaced the sacramental system with “encounter” and “dialogue,” replaced Catholic doctrine with “pastoral sensitivity,” and replaced the supernatural life with social activism. And now Schnell wonders why education has been reduced to the production of acceptable outputs? The answer is staring him in the face, but he cannot see it because he inhabits the very system that produced the disaster.
The Missing King: Christ the King Has No Place in This Vision
Perhaps the most telling omission in Schnell’s commentary is the complete absence of any reference to the social reign of Christ the King. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to remind the world that “the Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men” and that “men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals.” Pius XI declared that rulers of states have the duty to “publicly honor Christ and obey Him” and that the state must order “all relations in the state on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles, both in the issuing of laws and in the administration of justice, as well as in the education and formation of youth in sound doctrine and purity of morals” (Quas Primas).
Schnell’s vision of education, however, is entirely privatized and individualist. He speaks of “honest minds” and “careful judgment” but never of the obligation of education to form citizens who will work for the establishment of Christ’s reign over society. He speaks of “formation” but never of the duty of Catholic schools to produce not merely good intellectuals but saints — souls in the state of sanctifying grace, fortified by the sacraments, armed with Catholic doctrine, and prepared to do battle against the enemies of the Church in every sphere of human life. His vision is, in the end, a bourgeois vision: comfortable, respectable, and utterly devoid of the Catholic sense of mission.
The Teacher Who Is Not a Priest
Schnell writes movingly about the importance of the “teacher-scholar whose presence, judgment and intellectual seriousness cannot be automated.” He is right that the teacher’s role is irreplaceable. But what kind of teacher does he envision? A “provost and professor of mathematics” — himself. A layman with “adjunct appointments in biochemistry and cell biology” at a secular medical school. There is nothing wrong with being a mathematician or a layman. But when the most prominent voice commenting on Catholic education in a major Catholic portal is a lay scientist with no apparent formation in theology, philosophy, or the Church’s magisterial teaching on education, something has gone terribly wrong.
The Catholic tradition has always recognized that the best teachers are those who are themselves formed in the faith — and, ideally, those who are consecrated to God. St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, whom the article’s background image depicts, was a priest who devoted his entire life to the education of the poor and founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. He did not merely teach intellectual habits; he formed souls in the faith, prepared children for the sacraments, and insisted that his teachers see themselves as ministers of God’s grace. Schnell’s vision of the teacher as a “guide in inquiry” is a pale shadow of the Catholic reality. A true Catholic teacher is not merely a guide in inquiry but a witness to the Truth — and the Truth is not a set of propositions to be discovered through seminar discussion but the Person of Jesus Christ, “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), who entrusted His teaching authority to His Church and commanded her to “teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19).
Conclusion: The Ruins Cannot Be Repaired Without the True Church
Santiago Schnell’s commentary is, in the final analysis, a symptom of the very disease it purports to diagnose. He laments the emptiness of an education that rewards performance over understanding, but he cannot identify the cause: the systematic destruction of Catholic education by the conciliar revolution. He calls for the formation of “honest minds” but cannot point to the only source of true honesty — the grace of God conferred through the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He invokes Milton’s metaphor of repairing the ruins but cannot name the only Builder capable of the repair: Our Lord Jesus Christ, operating through His one true Church.
The ruins of our first Parents cannot be repaired by pedagogical redesign, oral defenses, transparency requirements, or any other human contrivance. They can be repaired only by grace — the grace that flows from the Cross of Calvary through the sacraments of the Catholic Church, administered by validly ordained priests, under the authority of the true successors of St. Peter. No machine will ever repair those ruins, as Schnell correctly observes. But neither will any educational philosophy that ignores the sacraments, denies the Church’s authority, reduces formation to intellectual habits, and substitutes natural virtue for supernatural grace.
The age of AI has not created the crisis of Catholic education. It has merely exposed it. And the solution to that crisis is not more technology, more transparency, or more pedagogical innovation. The solution is a return to the unchanging Catholic faith: the true Mass, the true sacraments, the true doctrine, and the true authority of the Church that Christ founded and that endures — not in the structures occupying the Vatican, but in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by true pastors who hold fast to the deposit of faith once delivered to the saints.
Sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago — without doctrine, life is but the image of death. Let those who would repair the ruins begin by restoring the doctrine that the conciliar sect has thrown into ruin.
Source:
Repairing the Ruins: Why AI Can’t Replace Education (ncregister.com)
Date: 13.04.2026