I spent a lot of high school starting my assignments confused. I stared at a blank page, watched my cursor flash on my screen, with no idea how to make the words say what I wanted them to. I was fortunate to have an amazing team of high school history and English teachers who didn't rescue me from that feeling of confusion. They sat with me in it, pushed me to rewrite a thesis for a fifth time, explain an interpretation out loud, and defend it when it was challenged. Until, finally, I built the exact sentence that actually carried the weight of what I was trying to say. They taught me to write, to synthesize huge amounts of information into a convincing argument, to articulate ideas in a clean way, and to appreciate the nuances in other perspectives. That discomfort, repeated for four years, is the most valuable thing I took from my early education. It's also the thing I worry we are quietly engineering out of the next generation.
I studied history in college because of my high school teachers. Most professionals know what question comes next: “and what exactly do you intend to do with that degree?” I recognize it was a privilege to walk onto my college campus not thinking about how my major would translate into a job long-term. I didn't have an answer to this famously probing question, but I knew I enjoyed history. After all, you should study what you love, right?
Yet, like so many college freshmen, all the conviction I had about my degree choice was thrown off by the immense pressure I felt to prioritize quantitative skills. I was told I would only be hireable with a degree in Economics, Math, or Computer Science. I drank the Kool-Aid career centers and recruitment pipelines placed in front of young students: first study quantitative courses, then show proficiency in hard skills, and you will get a desirable career outcome.
After graduation, I went on to work in a competitive corporate role for several years. During this time, I also helped manage recruitment at my own undergraduate school, where I watched so many young students wrestle with that same dilemma: do I really have to study these "hard" skills to be hireable long-term? I could see the mental strain this choice put on so many of them.
Here's what nobody told me: in that same corporate job I held for many years, I used my history major every single day. The quantitative courses I'd taken as insurance almost never came up. What I did use every day was my learned ability to consume large amounts of information and opinions and piece together context into a condensed argument. Storytelling with a synthesized narrative was the exact thing that set me apart from my peers, the same peers who'd been promised that “edge” and “quant wizardry” were the only path to career success. I started building those skills in high school and then in my college history classes through one badly written, heavily revised paragraph at a time. Through my studies, I spent countless hours poring over sentence structures, dissecting sentences, stitching words together, and reading audiences to understand how my words would land. No one handed me those skills. I had to struggle for them.
There's an irony here that I don't think is being said enough right now: many of the exact quantitative skills my peers and I were told were non-negotiable for employability are now the skills new tools are best at doing. Modeling, calculating, even a lot of basic coding can be handed over to a machine today. Meanwhile, the synthesis, judgment, argument-building, and decision-making I learned through the humanities are remaining irreplaceable. And in the end, my humanities education was my biggest asset in the workforce.
The real threat of AI isn't to jobs. It's to the human brain. AI usage right now is moving in a direction that erases thinking before it has a chance to form. In schools, students are using AI to solve math problems, write entire essays, and problem-solve on their behalf, skipping the exact struggle that built my early career. Mainstream large language models are genuinely revolutionary for the generations who lived a full life before relying on technology to aid in their decision-making; that part of our brains was already built. Not for kids. Right now, millions of students are using AI tools that were never designed with their development in mind, with no guidance or guardrails, no instruction on truth, no learned ability to question and challenge outputs.
So the question facing schools isn't really "how do we teach kids to use AI responsibly." That framing assumes the only thing at risk is a skill gap. The deeper risk is whether students ever build the capacity to think independently at all, to sit in the unknown, to wrestle with hard material, to form a view and defend it. For me, that capacity was built almost entirely in humanities classrooms, not in the quantitative courses I was told mattered more. There is an indelible place for humanities in the future. There has to be. The only way we preserve it is by protecting critical thinking and the art of organically struggling.
This is why I founded EducAIte with my co-founder, Erica: we want students to live in a world where they can coexist with AI and use it safely without losing the ability to think for themselves. We believe there's a world made possible by EducAIte where learning in K-12 schools prepares students to navigate the tools they need to be successful in the future while still preserving the purely human art of real thinking, the same work teachers have always done in their classrooms. And the same work that made me into the thinker I am today.
And no, before you ask, AI did NOT write this. This was all me. I did use it to proofread and check my grammar, just to make sure my writing is still as good as it used to be in high school.
Reach out to Campbell Schafer to learn more about how to bring EducAIte to your school: campbell@educaitelearning.com, or contact us here.