Reading · The Walled Garden Education

I never expected a 42,000-word papal document to converge so neatly with a K-12 newsletter. And yet here we are.

Two weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI. You may have seen the headlines, but I’d encourage everyone to read it for themselves. You don’t need to be Catholic or religious to find it valuable; it is a tremendous and refreshing piece of moral reasoning about technology and people.

Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, deliberately marking the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which directly addressed the first industrial revolution’s threat to the worker, insisting that the Church could not ignore “the concrete lives of people.” Leo XIV is consciously doing the same for the human person against the disruption of AI.

The pope’s encyclical calls for institutions to protect the vulnerable against a disruptive technology rather than mirror the market that produces it, which is precisely what The Walled Garden Education has argued schools should do. My work builds its case from empirical and developmental evidence; the pope’s rests on theology and a 135-year-old body of social teaching. The logic is the same in each case: an institution entrusted with the vulnerable owes them protection, not optimization.

Both refuse to let efficiency become the measure of a person.

§104

“... ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.”

Here, Leo refuses to reduce our discernment about technology to the straightforward binary we often reach for. So often, the conversation collapses into an all-too-simple question: Are we using the tool well or badly? But that question rests on the assumption that the tool is itself neutral. The pope disagrees. He insists that any system embeds assumptions about people — in what it decides to measure and what it chooses to ignore.

I’ve argued the same thing, but from the classroom rather than first principles. The question of whether a tool is good or bad, or whether we use it properly, obscures a better framing: Who is the tool for and what does its use cost them? The same tool that can expedite a teacher’s work can rob a student of the executive function she’s still building.

Technology isn’t bad. The pope calls it “a profoundly human reality.” The more important point is that a tool is never just a tool. Its design is shaped by others’ ideas about what people need, what people are for, and those ideas act on us whether we notice them or not.

§140

“Educating people about the use of AI … involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used. The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions…”

Elsewhere in the encyclical, when Leo writes about work and the economy, he treats AI as a tool to be governed wisely, to be regulated in pursuit of the common good. Under those circumstances, it’s a tool to be used. But when he turns to education, his argument shifts. He doesn’t just ask us to teach youth how to use it well. He insists that we teach them when not to use the tool.

The spark of curiosity in a young mind is easily extinguished when one can summon a polished paragraph in seconds. Doing so eradicates encounters with “desirable difficulties” — with the discomfort of not yet knowing something. But it’s in that discomfort, in the friction of temporary struggle and confusion, that curiosity is born.

Leo identifies the casualty precisely: “the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time.” He reaches back to Plato to underscore the same idea — that the deepest and most valuable things are learned only slowly. I’ve reached for the research of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, as well as my decade of classroom experience to make the same point. A machine that removes the struggle removes the education.

§147

“Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”

I could have written that sentence. In fact, I have written it many times over the past ten months.

This is the central argument of The Walled Garden Education in a single line. A school that mimics the digital world by reflexively adopting its tools and replicating its disruptions is what I’ve called a Marketplace Mirror: an institution that takes its cues from the economy outside its walls and reflects them back at children. The pope is describing its opposite: a Walled Garden school. He explains that schools exist to offer what the marketplace, by definition, cannot: occasionally inefficient but developmentally necessary experiences, and relationships built on trust. Those aren’t “nice-to-haves” alongside academic work; they are the precondition for academic achievement.

Earlier in the encyclical, when Leo writes about markets and labour, AI is cast as a potentially “valuable tool”. When he turns to education, his language becomes unconditional: “schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world…” When you read the whole work closely, it’s clear that his position is graded. Its caution is thinnest where the subject is a formed adult navigating an economy, but it tightens steadily and deliberately as it moves toward children, which is the appropriate response to a simple fact: the more vulnerable the person, the higher the standard of protection we owe them. It’s the same logic a hospital follows, and the same logic I’ve argued for in schools.

The marketplace is free to move fast only as long as it serves the common good. A school entrusted with the wellbeing and development of our youth is held to a higher standard still.

§142

“… interventions by legislators are appropriate for setting age limits, holding service providers accountable rather than shifting the whole burden of control onto families… Thus can children and adolescents, who are entrusted to our care, be genuinely protected as a precious treasure. At the same time, it is also necessary to teach children, adolescents and young people how to recognize manipulation, defend their dignity and respect that of others in digital environments.”

Children are “entrusted to our care.” The relationship between a school and a child is custodial; teachers, administrators, and support staff are responsible for our kids. That is the foundational logic that underpins the case I’ve made for the Precautionary Principle in schools. Our students’ attendance is compulsory and they can’t consent to their participation, so when a technology has the potential to impose harm that might not surface for years, the burden of proof for its efficacy and safety belongs with the tool and its vendor, not with the child using it. Leo makes the same point. The burden shouldn’t be placed on children or their families; it belongs to “service providers”.

In the second half of the quote above, the pope adds another responsibility. He insists that our kids are taught to recognize and resist manipulation in order to defend their dignity. This requires genuine AI literacy rather than mere proficiency — the difference between operating a tool and knowing what it is, who built it, and what its use might cost you.

Protection is the correct first step, but it must be complemented by education. Creating the boundary that allows for children to critically investigate the tool is the responsible, fiduciary approach. By doing so, we keep developing minds safe long enough that they can grow strong enough to defend themselves.

Pope Leo reasons from a theological tradition and centuries of Church doctrine. My rationale emerges from classroom experience, philosophy, cognitive science, and developmental research. We may not share the same starting points, but we end up in the same place.

A school is not a mirror of the marketplace. A child is not “a project to be optimized.” Our youth are owed healthy and protected developmental conditions. They deserve the slow, friction-filled space to learn to think for themselves.

I take the convergence in these arguments to mean that they point to something real and important. The case against handing childhood to machinery is neither religious anxiety nor secular panic. It’s what you tend to conclude when you actually work with children, pay attention to the experiences they’re afforded, and notice what might be missing.

We live in a moment when perfunctory political rhetoric routinely subordinates moral clarity to the promise of efficiency, when “innovation” is treated as its own justification. Pope Leo rejects that subordination. Humanity, and all its imperfections, is worth defending. If this encyclical makes anything clear, it’s that remaining human is something we either protect or surrender.

So I’m glad that Pope Leo XIV calls for a Walled Garden Education even if he never uses the name.

The case for protecting children’s development can be made from different directions, which is exactly why it’s worth passing along. If this piece resonated, share it with the educators, administrators, and parents in your circle. The argument only gets stronger when more people recognize they’ve been making it too, from wherever they happen to stand.

The Pope Calls for a Walled Garden Education

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