At the center of the Christian faith is not an abstraction but a Person. John tells us that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, ESV). Christianity therefore takes embodiment seriously: human beings are formed through relationships, presence, imitation, discipline, and love. That truth should make Christian parents think carefully about an educational culture that routinely places screens, software, and now chatbots between children and the human work of learning.

I recently participated in an August 19 Faith Leaders for Secure AI briefing hosted by the Alliance for Secure AI, where I serve on the board. One presentation came from Michael Marinaccio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, a father of five children and longtime technologist who has spent years warning about the effects of excessive classroom technology.

Marinaccio offered five words that stayed with me: “In education, friction is key.”

Much of modern technology is designed around a simple promise: remove the friction. Good technology removes waiting, searching, effort, and inconvenience. That may be useful when we are ordering an airline ticket. It is a very different proposition when we are forming a child.

A student struggles through a difficult paragraph instead of asking a chatbot to summarize it. He tries the math problem again. He searches his memory before reaching for a machine. He writes a paragraph, realizes it is weak, and rewrites it. He asks a teacher a question and discovers that the answer may require thought, patience, and conversation.

Those moments may be inefficient. They are also a critical aspect of education.

The research gives Marinaccio’s warning considerable weight. A 2025 field experiment published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences involving nearly 1,000 high school math students found that students given access to a standard GPT-4 interface performed substantially better while they could use it. But when AI access was removed for a later exam, those students scored 17% worse than students who had never had access to it. A version of the tutor designed with learning safeguards largely avoided that decline.

That distinction goes to the heart of the matter: better performance is not necessarily better learning.

Educational psychologist Manu Kapur has spent years studying what he calls “productive failure.” His work distinguishes short-term performance from deeper learning and shows why students can benefit from wrestling with problems before receiving instruction. Sometimes the difficulty is doing part of the teaching.

That brings us to the most important question. Suppose the technology companies fix most hallucinations. Suppose privacy protections improve. Suppose objectionable material can be screened out. Would the educational problem disappear?

Marinaccio’s answer to me was no. Even then, he said, schools would still face “ethical alignment, sycophancy, skill-loss, and beyond.”

A perfectly accurate chatbot can still be educationally destructive if it performs the intellectual labor the child was supposed to perform.

This is already more than a hypothetical concern. Common Sense Media reported this month that 70% of teens use AI for schoolwork. Among those users, 63% said they use it to get answers, while nearly four in 10 said AI causes them to generate fewer ideas of their own. Pew likewise found earlier this year that more than half of American teens had used chatbots for schoolwork.

The temptation for parents is to answer that children will have to use AI in their careers, so schools must expose them to it early. There is truth in the first half of that argument. AI will be part of their world. But it does not follow that children should outsource foundational thinking before those foundations are secure.

Children must be taught to think before teaching them to outsource thinking.

Marinaccio made another point Christian parents should hear. “Chatbot tutors lack a fundamental component of a proper education: love,” he told me. That echoes his public argument that education is an activity of love and that the bond between teacher and student cultivates curiosity and wonder.

A machine can generate explanations. A teacher can know the child.

A chatbot can simulate patience, encouragement, even concern. It cannot love the child, bear responsibility for him, or model before him a life worth imitating.

A good teacher recognizes discouragement, laziness, embarrassment, courage, dishonesty, curiosity, and perseverance. She can press a gifted student who is coasting and encourage a struggling student who is ready to quit. A meta-analysis of 99 studies found that positive teacher-student relationships were associated with greater student engagement and academic achievement.

That human relationship is not incidental to education. It is one of the means through which education occurs.

Marinaccio also warned that we are raising children with too little silence, curiosity, wonder, boredom, discernment, and peace. In our follow-up conversation, he argued that children need quiet in order to reflect on what they have learned and create ideas of their own. Perhaps boredom is not a childhood emergency. Perhaps sometimes it is the empty space in which curiosity begins.

For Christians, this reaches beyond grades and test scores. Scripture describes mature discernment as something “trained by constant practice” (Hebrews 5:14, ESV). That is a spiritual truth, not a neuroscience claim, but the principle of formation is unmistakable. Discernment, like maturity, develops through practice. It cannot be downloaded.

None of this requires Christian parents or schools to become technological Luddites. Even UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI insists that human agency must remain central to education, while OECD research suggests that limited educational technology can help even as excessive digital distraction hurts performance. The issue is not whether technology belongs in education. It is whether technology serves the child’s development or substitutes for it.

The answer is not ignorance of AI. It is order.

Foundational education should be human-first and AI-later. Children should learn to read, write, calculate, remember, reason, converse, and sustain attention before becoming dependent on a machine that can do those things for them. Older students should learn what AI can do, where it fails, and how to use it without surrendering the intellectual work that education is supposed to cultivate.

Christian parents should not seek a frictionless education for their children. We should seek one that forms them to love truth, pursue wisdom, persevere through difficulty, listen to others, and eventually use powerful machines without depending upon them.

Sometimes the struggle is not standing in the way of the education.

The struggle is the education.