To the graduates of Logos Online, class of 2025, congratulations. To the parents of these graduates, well done. To everyone else assembled here, greetings in the Lord. And my hearty thanks are extended to Larry Stephenson and the leadership of Logos Online for giving me the opportunity to address you all yet again.

You graduates are on the threshold of a new world, as countless graduates before you have been. These exercises are called a commencement for a reason, and that reason is that a new chapter in your life is about to commence. But for you all, and for the graduates a few years ahead of you and a few years behind, there is an additional layer that needs to be taken into account.

There were many centuries when graduates were looking out on a world that was new to them, but which was the same old predictable world to which their great grandfather had once been introduced. Such graduates were new arrivals in an old world. But you all are new arrivals in a world that is also a new arrival. Everybody’s new. Nobody knows anybody, and hardly anyone knows anything.

I am referring to a series of cultural and technological upheavals—some of which we falsely think we have gotten used to, and some of which haven’t actually hit us yet. There are many examples of this to which I could point, but let me just mention the one that is the hot topic right now—the world of AI. Anyone who believes that this will have no impact on the world of education needs to sit down and think a little bit harder for a bit.

Just think for a moment . . . your doctor of ten years from now is currently making his way through medical school with the help of ChatGPT and Grok—so you had better start eating healthy now.

The transformative waves are coming at us far more rapidly than they used to. Nothing is slowing down. Think about it. Julius Caesar got around in pretty much the same way that George Washington did—by foot, horse, or sail. But then the Industrial Revolution hit. The first American president to ride on a train was Andrew Jackson, in 1833. Seventy years later, in 1903, the Wright brothers took to flight. Just sixty-six years after that, Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the moon. And photos from that era show Houston Control manned by a bunch of engineers . . . and their slide rules. All of this was a function of the Industrial Revolution, but then in the latter half of the twentieth century the Digital Revolution started to rumble like a restive volcano, and then exploded. Most of you assembled here have more computing power in your pockets and purses than was available to Apollo 11. And now, even though we had barely caught our breath from all of that, the AI revolution has hit us from behind. Many of you from out of town made your way to this event thanks to directions from your phone. Not only so, but you can’t even remember how you used to get around in strange cities back before you had such a helpful phone.

So what are we to make of all this? If we are committed to classical Christian education, and to a recovery of the old ways of thinking and learning, what should our attitude be with regard to AI and education? You are obviously good with the use of technology, are you not? This is the graduation ceremony for Logos Online, is it not? What are we to do? How are we to navigate this?

If you were looking for a biblical worldview summary of all this, you are in luck. I have a biblical hot take right here. We live in a fallen, broken world, but one that is also under the sovereign governance of the Lord Jesus Christ. Two things follow from this. It means that we must not trust ourselves, and that we must put our trust in Him.

“Be not wise in thine own eyes: Fear the Lord, and depart from evil” (Proverbs 3:7).

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; And lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6).

Bringing it down to street level, this means these technological advances are the mortal enemy of every fool, and a godsend to everyone who is committed to a Puritan work ethic, and a zeal for the glory of God. These inventions, these devices, are being introduced into the real world—and the real world is governed by Christ. Reality as such is the foe of every fool, and the friend of everyone who loves Christ.

My prompt was: “Write me a short poem in rhymed couplets, iambic pentameter, one that is four lines long, and which congratulates graduates on their dubious achievements in a world influenced by AI.”

Within a second, Grok churned out this:

Congrats, dear grads, your dubious feats shine bright,
In AI's world, where truth and fiction blend;
Your skills, though grand, may dance in murky light,
Yet still you stride where human dreams transcend.

Okay, not bad. Kind of B minus level, but still . . . fulfilled the assignment.

So there are of course the great and obvious pitfalls—the temptations to laziness and dishonesty. In an online world, to cheat appears easy, and it is sometimes inviting . . . to the one aspiring to live like a fool. Confronted with hard work, students have always been tempted to fudge. But in the older world, such fudging sometimes involved a considerable amount of work in itself. What the new technology has done is greatly reduce the friction for fudging. All of this is true enough, but also obvious. Cheating is always cheating, whether old style or new, and so I shouldn’t need to belabor that point. But there is a more sinister temptation embedded in all of this that I want to warn you all about.

The great temptation is that of forgetting that God created man for work. Work existed in the Garden before the Fall, and is not a consequence of the Fall. Work will continue in the resurrection. God did not create us for standing around, and we will not be raised to life everlasting in order to stand around forever and ever.

True enough, sin has complicated things, including our work, and one of the central temptations that sin presents is that of tempting us to think that tools, and wealth, and prosperity are all given so that we can go live among the Lotus eaters. We think of them as introductions to a life of leisure, and they are not. People think that they should fast track their way to retirement, and that retirement should consist of thinking up different ways to suit yourself.

But no. God actually gives us tools so that we can work even harder, and at a higher level. Labor-saving devices have been very poorly named. They should not be thought of by us as labor-saving devices. They are labor-accelerating devices. Used rightly, the technological explosions that are happening all around us now should be taking us from kindergarten to grad school.

There will never be a technological development that makes wisdom stupid. There will never be a line of code that unwinds the book of Proverbs. And there will never be any device that turns folly and stupidity into a constitutional right, well-protected from any negative consequences of our actions. “Well, well, well,” you will someday say. “If it isn’t the consequences of my own choices.”

What you have in your basket now is an education. And an education is fruit. And do you know what? Fruit is heavy. You have to carry it. And when your education enables you to figure out the tools you have been given, if you conduct yourself in wisdom, the result will be that you start carrying things that are even heavier.

Thank you, and again, congratulations.

One of the questions I have received with some regularity over the years has concerned the wisdom of sex-segregated schools. What do I think of that? Because it concerns the way of a man with a maid (Prov. 30:18-19), we need to proceed carefully. The subject is enormously complex, kind of like the way of an eagle in the air, or a snake on a rock. Or a ship at sea.

I am going to begin with some observations about what I have seen over the years in our experience at Logos School, a sex-integrated school, and then take it from there. Thankfully, being old-school traditionalists, we only need to establish cultural expectations for two sexes, not 57. That simplifies things somewhat, but not as much as you might expect.

Allow me to throw down some disparate observations on this general topic, without trying to tie them together into a coherent flow.

A school is not responsible to oversee courtships—the parents are. Because of that, our policy has been to make sure that if any pairing off is happening, it needs to happen after school hours, and off school grounds. A guy and a girl can like each other, that’s fine, but we don’t want it to look like that during school hours. No public displays of affection, hand-holding, nothing like that. We might not believe the parents are being wise in allowing a couple of sixteen-year-olds to be such chums, but the school needs to stay in its own lane. But part of that lane means keeping sexual distractions from disrupting the atmosphere that is necessary for genuine education to take place.

If you have a drama program, be very careful with regard to plays that have a romantic component, and watch your lead actors carefully. Don’t put them in a position where you jump start something that nobody wanted to have jump started (except for the two of them).

In an integrated school, the boys and girls have the opportunity to grow up together, like cousins almost. If they are studying in an environment that does not routinely end in couples pairing off, they are free to learn a great deal about the opposite sex, doing so in a clear-headed way. Learning about the opposite sex in a relationship can be like studying in a fog. Too many things are going on, and some of what you think isn’t going on, is, and some of what you think is going on, isn’t.

Particularly, a school is a great place to inculcate cultural manners. Opening doors for the girls, letting the girls exit the classroom first, etc. These practices instill many more principles at a deeper level than people usually recognize. Women must be honored is something boys and men need to learn, and twelve years of learning it is not too much.

The cultural life of our school includes dances, but they are dances, not proms. The dances include folk dances and reels, and are not the kind of occasion where a guy and a girl rock slowly back and forth together, from one foot to the other, trying not to get aroused.

One of the advantages of a sex-segregated school is that you can teach boys without the distraction of girls. When a girl is present, or when the girls are, this introduces all kinds of behaviors in the boys that would be absent otherwise. Those behaviors can range from showing off for the girls to resenting them, to competing for them, and so on. But it is too easy to assume that girls are only going to be a distraction if they are present. The boys are walking through your hallways with testosterone sloshing around inside them, and that means that the girls are going to be a distraction regardless of where they might be located. Removing girls is not the same thing as removing sex, as the all-too-common homosexuality in boarding schools attests.

In a healthy Christian school, the school will enforce sexual manners and mores, while the parents enforce the standards of morality. The school’s role is to have public standards that will reinforce what the parents desire, and is not to step in to compete with or replace the parents. Now, of course, there will be occasions when the standards of morality are broken, and the school will need to decide what to do. But the failure is a parental one, and on the part of the kids, not one where the school is responsible . . . unless the school has contributed to a culture of lax standards when it comes to interactions between the sexes generally.

When a school sets up cultural expectations like this, it provides a real service to those parents who are biblically wise, and who want to take their responsibilities in this seriously. In addition, it sets up a biblical protection for those parents who might easily slide into the folly of trying to relive their high school years vicariously. Just like dad might want his son to be the quarterback because that was his ambition back in the day, so also mom might want her daughter to be the stunner at the prom. The school can help everybody out by just not having a prom. Modern problems require modern solutions.

This does not mean that you rob the kids of the experience of learning how to behave in a socially demanding setting. Many years ago, my wife started an event called Protocol at Logos—the kids got training in basic etiquette, and then on the appointed day, they all got gussied up and went to a nice restaurant together, and then to a concert or a play, or an event like that. The gents were instructed in things like how to escort a lady, how to seat her, how to converse while working the room, and so on, and then they were assigned their escort.

In short, a school should not pretend that the boys and the girls are identical, for they are very much not. At the same time, it is the part of wisdom to maintain a standard of decorum that might make some observers assume that the school was trying to treat them as identical. But no . . . not at all.

One of the few comforts we find through a thoughtful survey of the modern world is the realization that stupidity doesn’t work. Those who rebel against God must also, of necessity, rebel against the world he made. The consequence of this is that all who so rebel, lose.

One of the central follies of modern educational assumptions is that learning should be “fun.” This dictum, unfortunately, is derived as much from our television sets as it is from departments of education. Consequently, many Christian parents take this assumption with them into their homeschooling, or when they enroll their children in the Christian school.

As a consequence, we tend to evaluate educational progress by the wrong criteria. Instead of evaluating the work to be done, and then working to bring our children to the point where they can do it, we go the other way. We ask, “How much work can my children do while still enjoying themselves?”

The Bible teaches that he who is slothful in his work is a brother to him who is a great destroyer (Prov. 18:9). Those who substitute anything for work in education are enemies and destroyers of education. The motives may be “good,” but the consequences are always the same. Now of course this is not a call for grim faces in education. But we must stop trying to get our children to enjoy themselves, and begin teaching them to enjoy their work. If we permit, for whatever reason, slothfulness in education, we are destroying education. And because we are destroying the education of our children, we are in fact attacking our children. 

For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load (Gal. 6:3-5). We must teach our children to guard against self-deception as they consider the academic work they do. In contrast to this, our government’s educational establishment has set up, as one of their primary objectives, the inculcation of such self-deception. “We want all the kids to feel good about themselves regardless of performance.” So they abolish grades, distinctions, and standards, all in the name of maintaining the students’ self-esteem. In other words, we want the students to think they are something when they are nothing. The charade may continue (possibly) until graduation, when the hapless graduate discovers that stupidity doesn’t work, and that he can’t either. The unkind world will only let him manage the kind of cash register manufactured by Fischer-Price. 

But if a thoughtful student is taught to examine his own work, it is right that he rejoice in it. A job well done is truly satisfying. Christian educators must strive to give their students this kind of satisfaction. And this means work.

The fruit of hard work is a great blessing. Moreover, it is a blessing thoughtful parents will want their children to enjoy. Do you see a man who excels in this work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before unknown men (Prov. 22:29). But in order to enjoy the fruit of outstanding work, we can’t start instilling good work habits after college. It must start twenty years earlier, and parents ought to impose it.

Still, we should notice an important distinction. Good honest toil, which is hard because it is hard, differs from aimless toil, which is hard because it is boring. We should seek the former, but the latter is worthless. All hard work is difficult, but not everything that is difficult is hard work.

But having established the fact that work is good, and that it is also good to teach our children to love honest work, we still must address some practical questions. How much is too much? What should the “work load” be?

First, we must not assume that the work load is too great just because some of our students are struggling. Egalitarianism is pervasive in our culture, and we must not bend to it in any way. Some students will always cruise through the material without much difficulty, and others will have to sweat bullets to get a B minus. This is the way God made the world, and we should rejoice in it. What is easy for one is hard for another. Educators must not establish a course of study which levels or minimizes those differences.  

Second, at the opposite extreme, some people pile on the work, in the name of “high standards,” and then all the students crumple. If this happens, the problem is almost certainly with the teacher, level of materials, or both. The solution here to back off. If, in a class of twenty-one, seven got A’s on the test while three got F’s, nothing may be wrong in the way the classroom is being run. If all twenty-one fail however, it is the teacher’s failure.

Third, we shouldn’t determine the appropriate level of work by listening to students grumbling. In the first place, grumbling is sin and should not be encouraged in any way; in the second place, grumbling as a wildly inaccurate indicator. Lazy students can grumble when they never had it so good, and diligent students may suffer silently as they try to make your stupid bricks without any straw. But if the students grumble, a good way to respond is to give an extra assignment. The student obviously needs practice in doing work cheerfully.

In short, learning how to teach your students to love hard work involves a great deal of . . . work

First printed in Credenda Vol. 6, No. 2