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Sophisticated artificial intelligence tools are making it easier than ever for high school and college students not only to cheat but to make cheating virtually undetectable. “Humanizers” can rewrite AI-generated prose to sound organic, while “autotypers” simulate the cadence of human keystrokes, complete with pauses and typo corrections, in programs such as Google Docs.
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The dangers extend far beyond rampant cheating. As students increasingly outsource thinking to machines, we risk a generation less practiced in the very capacities education is meant to develop: judgment, creativity, persistence, and independent thought. Yet AI simultaneously presents incredible opportunities for personalized instruction and high-impact tutoring that can make real advances in student learning.
The duality of AI’s promise and peril is real. The challenge is to ensure the use of artificial intelligence strengthens rather than diminishes human agency. As a school leader who has led public charter schools in New York for more than 15 years, I believe the best defense against the worst excesses of artificial intelligence is to steep students in the other form of AI: ancient intelligence.
Ancient intelligence begins with a question that is as old as philosophy itself: What does it mean to live a good life? The Roman philosopher Cicero called this the summum bonum — the highest good, the central aim of a virtuous life. When young people develop an ethical framework for what is worth pursuing, they become less vulnerable to every convenient shortcut that technology places within reach. They develop the self-restraint to say no to outsourcing their thinking or cheating with AI tools, because they know it is the wrong thing to do.
That is among the reasons why I partnered with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy to develop the freely available Agency curriculum. Its purpose is not simply to teach students about virtue, but to help them practice the self-command, judgment, and confidence necessary to make wise choices and lead self-determined lives of meaning and purpose.
Agency is a 30-lesson curriculum designed for ninth graders and adaptable for young people navigating what I call “the deciding decade,” ages 14 to 24. Choices made during these years about education, faith, relationships, and work can exert an outsize influence on the rest of life. Reaching the highest good requires agency: the exercise of free will guided by moral discernment.
The Agency curriculum starts with a simple conviction that young people are moral agents capable of shaping their own character. Each lesson asks students to wrestle with enduring questions drawn from classical philosophy, literature, history, and lived experience: What can be learned from Frederick Douglass’s supposition that self-made men are not born into privilege but forge their own path through adversity and productive struggle? How can they embrace the FREE pillars of human flourishing: family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship? What habits help them practice delayed gratification, responsibility, and excellence?
Students encounter the stoic distinction between what is and is not within our control, then apply it to problems they face: peer pressure, plagiarism, online identity, and the seductive convenience of artificial intelligence.
The hope is that students who once defaulted to the path of least resistance learn that the obstacle itself can be the pathway. Every time they outsource a difficult intellectual task, they realize they forfeit an opportunity to develop critical thinking, knowledge, and resilience. A shortcut may yield a better grade today while leaving the student less capable tomorrow.
The intrinsic motivation Cicero associated with the highest good grows through repeatedly choosing the harder path and discovering that it often leads to greater competence and self-respect.
Ultimately, we can treat the rise of undetectable AI cheating as a purely technical problem to be solved with better detection software. That is an arms race society will likely lose. Or we can address the deeper question: What kind of human beings are we helping young people become? The Agency curriculum offers one concrete answer. It does not pretend that virtue can be downloaded nor that character education is a quick fix. It simply insists that the oldest insights into human flourishing remain the most reliable guide for navigating the newest challenges.
The students most likely to thrive in an age of artificial intelligence are those who have first mastered the ancient art of governing themselves. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin famously stated, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
By helping students pursue the summum bonum, we equip them to lead lives of genuine freedom, purpose, and contribution — lives in which technology serves human dignity rather than the reverse. That is the highest good education can offer, and it remains as urgent today as it was in Cicero’s time.
