When Elon Musk boasted that SpaceX will be offering us all rides to the moon, he wasn’t arguing that lunar tourism would justify the $1 trillion IPO. He was giving us an image that we can feel: the world has changed. A new age has emerged: the age of AI, robotics, and factories on the moon. “That’s what SpaceX is all about — to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone.”
Now, Cary Christian School has an interesting response to this challenge: build new playgrounds and add stadium seating to our competition field. Why? While no one knows everything that is about to occur, we do know three things for certain:
- More people will end up being used as a tool by AI than will use AI as a tool.
- The people who know how to develop deep connections with others and with reality will continue to flourish.
- Most importantly, people will long for places—real places: places that anticipate their arrival, that were designed for them, and that continually call them to something more.
By increasing our focus on play and community, we increase our ability to fulfill three of our fundamental promises as a classical and Christian school.
Promise #1: Your child will never be a tool.
Once upon a time, every school in the West read The Odyssey and taught Latin. Thus, what made classical education special was not a particular book the students read or a particular subject the teachers taught. The value of a classical education was found then and is found now in what the school seeks to accomplish through reading great books or by mastering meaningful disciplines. A classical school provides a liberal arts education, offering an education that develops the skills of free men.
Men who live freely in the world with others have mastered certain skills. They know the truth. They speak words that are true. And truth guides their actions.
Promise #2: School will be fun.
To be clear, mastering the liberal arts is hard. In fact, most people spend their lives in bondage to a boss, to technology, to debt, or to a vice because they refuse to do the work of learning how to live freely in the world with other people. Contemplate that fact: most people prefer bondage. And here is what’s even sadder: they would rather their children be slaves to their own feelings and to technological devices than put them in places that will call them to do hard things.
Coming to school is not entertainment and you cannot gain the benefits of school from passive engagement.
School is a path of “joyful discovery.” Each day, we discover more about the wonders and the beauties of God’s created order. We discover more about who we are in Christ and who we are becoming through Christ.
Promise #3: Your child will always be a Knight.
When your family passes the Oak Tree, you are entering a place that longs for your arrival, and that calls you to more. You are giving your child a gift that is bigger than that one moment.
This place shapes them. They shape this place. Thus, they eventually become part of this place, and the place becomes part of them. Wherever they go, and whatever they become, this place awaits their return.
These promises are not intended to suggest that Cary Christian School will run from AI and the cultural changes that are coming. We will adopt these new tools with mission-driven strategic intentionality. This is why I spend so much time with our Robotics Team. Watching our students engage with seasoned programmers and engineers teaches me what’s next.
Why build new playgrounds and add stadium seating to our competition field? It is because, at Cary Christian School, we see “little distinction between work and play, labor and leisure, mind and body, education and recreation, love and religion,” We want your child to become “a master in the art of living”: a man or woman who “simply pursues his or her vision of excellence through whatever he or she is doing” (L. P. Jacks).
It matters that your child leaps out of the car and races off to school, even if he or she is headed to the playground or to soccer practice. In an age of space travel and AI, we want to remind ourselves of the things that make us most human. Those include, among many other things, the never-ending importance of play.
