Artificial Intelligence and the Healthy Parent-Teacher-Student Relationship
by Daniel Perez
I build the machines we have started calling intelligent; that is my profession. I am also a Waldorf graduate. This past year I sat with the faculty of High Mowing [Waldorf School] to think through what artificial intelligence is doing to their classrooms, and mentored several of their students to assist with senior projects on the subject. I come to this from two sides: I know what these systems are made of, down to the silicon, and I lived the Waldorf curriculum at the dawn of the personal computer.
Today’s students carry a supercomputer in their pockets. What I have seen, from both sides, is that AI’s deepest effect is not on any single assignment but on the relationships — teacher and student, parent and child — through which a young person is educated into thinking. And enthusiasm is the greatest tool in the educator’s toolbox. The question of our age is this: will I, as a student, need to think, or will the machine think for me? Must I do my homework, read, and learn to write, when the computer can do it faster and perhaps better? This article proposes a different calculus — for the nature of the human being and the needs of today’s youth.
Let me begin where the worry usually begins, and then set it aside. The anxiety in most staff rooms is about cheating, and testing has quietly broken down: it is now hard to know whether an essay was written by a student or by the machine. The one reliable tell is poignant — a child who has always struggled to string words together suddenly hands in fluent, confident prose. Teachers move writing back into the classroom; the math problem a phone would solve is worked again on paper; and some schools fence off the wifi; thus, a classroom can once more be a place where human beings simply meet.
But this is not, at heart, about cheating. Policing is a losing game, and it aims at the wrong thing. What these teachers are protecting is the space in which a young person can still catch fire about an idea — the enthusiasm that is the true engine of learning. A student who lets the machine do his homework has not merely skipped a task; he has skipped the very experience school exists to give him, and is left with nothing to be enthusiastic about, because the interesting part has been done by something that cannot be interested at all.
There is a deeper irony. If a student may hand in an essay written by AI, a tired teacher may be tempted to grade it with AI as well. Then the machine writes and the machine marks, and the two human beings who were meant to meet in that work have both quietly left the room. What evaporates is not only effort but directed intent, will, and moral participation on both sides of the desk. The relationship that was the real place of education is replaced by two mechanisms exchanging tokens.
This is why I keep returning to enthusiasm, and to thinking for its own sake. A capacity must be built before any tool can safely assist it. We would not hand a toddler a motorized cart and imagine we had taught her to walk; we let her struggle to her feet first — and she is delighted to do it. That delight is the sign the learning is alive. Thinking, too, must find its feet before we hand a child a machine that produces the finished work for him and relieves him of the very effort that would have made him a thinker. The reward for that patience is a young person who has discovered that his own thinking is worthy of development.
Education was never about training a future worker, but about drawing out the intelligence inherent in the child. That calculus has not changed. I could give you a philosophical treatise on how Hegel, in the Science of Logic, demonstrates the limited capacity of a machine. The machine is, after all, an entity of measure — a counter, a statistical correlator. It uses weighting coefficients on the tokens it was trained on. It cannot think, and it does not possess consciousness; it certainly has no moral compass. These are all topics I have discussed with the faculty of Waldorf schools, and in consequence I coined the term moral participation.
Moral participation is not a rulebook for how to behave, but a term for something uniquely human — a capability no machine may ever achieve, even if it can simulate intelligence. The human being lives within the formation of concepts and brings to the world a directed will and purpose. Many people, for instance, wondered what impact AI would have on technology and programming jobs.
As a computer architect, I have been hiring more engineers — but rather than programmers, I am hiring people whose capabilities align with exactly what Waldorf schools focus on: broader, conceptually minded employees — people who have a concern for the needs of the client, which means functionality and guided purpose. This is my meaning for what is moral and what is willed. Moral participation points to a new frontier in how we guide students, and it is a human-centered one: first, to develop conceptual thought for the sake of that activity alone; then, having mastered the activity of thought, to find a way to serve in the world, so that we become moral participants who direct the amoral machines toward the greater good. This is what I mean by engendering enthusiasm in the student: first, to express what only the student can achieve, in contrast to the machine; second, to reflect on the temptation to let a machine “do the homework,” since education is about the activity of thinking, not computer processing; and last, to serve our fellow men in moral participation.
There is a tendency, for parent, teacher, and student alike, to blame the “tech gods” for the illnesses technology has brought to our youth. And, to be clear, I am well aware of doom scrolling, and of the algorithms that key into our emotional state and convert our personal triggers into statistics to be exploited. But we will not win a fight in that game. Our domain and field of work are to retake the ground where we have control: understanding the purpose of education. In that purpose we transform apathy into enthusiasm, and gain clarity on what good the machine brings and what ills it engenders.
Perhaps an example from constitutional medicine is in order. The idea of a diluted dose of a substance as a form of healing is not unlike the idea of sparking, in a student, an enthusiasm for thinking for its own sake. In an earlier age such an idea would have seemed absurd: why would a student need to reflect on thinking itself? There were no machines that could simulate what a human being does; the moral was given by the pastor or the priest, and otherwise by the demands of society. Today all of that is in question. This is why I say that blaming corporate entities is a losing proposition. The structure of society has shifted, and where we have agency is in the home and in the classroom, not the boardroom.
Let me end where our agency actually lies. A Waldorf education has, for a century, done something that can look almost quaint — until the moment you need it, and that moment has arrived. It delays the screen and fills the early years with story and movement, with knitting and painting and the working of the hands, so that imagination and will are built up in the child before any device is introduced. It teaches through a human being who knows the child, not through a program that knows only which token is likely to come next. It asks the student to draw the diagram, write the essay, and work the proof himself — not because the machine could not produce them, but because producing them was never the point; becoming someone who can is.
Seen through the lens of this journal, that is a constitutional approach to education. Like a potentized remedy, it does not override the child and do his growing for him; it stirs his own forces — thinking, feeling, will — so that they strengthen. Artificial intelligence, used as a substitute, is the opposite prescription: it supplies the result, and the unused capacity, like an unused limb, wastes. The healthy path is not to keep the machine away in fear permanently, but to build the child’s own forces first, so that when the tool is at last placed in his hands he directs it, rather than being quietly replaced by it.
This is why, for all the real disquiet, I am not afraid. A machine that can convincingly imitate thinking is, in the end, a gift in disguise: it has forced us to say out loud what thinking is for, and to prize again the enthusiasm, the will, and the moral participation that no measure can supply. It has made visible and urgent exactly what a Waldorf education was always quietly cultivating. The task before parent, teacher, and student is not to defeat the machine but to become — consciously now — the thinkers it cannot be. If we do that together, in the home and in the classroom, the age of artificial intelligence may prove to be the age in which we finally learned to prize our innate capacities.
Daniel Perez is Chief Software Architect at Contruent and the founder of Threefold Capital Corp.
He holds a BSEE in computer architecture and is a Waldorf School graduate.
This post was originally published in the Fall 2026 Newsletter