Beyond the Classroom – Once More into the Classroom

Parenting in the AI Age: Why Character Matters More Than Ever.

As we enter the Age of AI, here’s one more thing parents have to consider: AI systems are getting better at reasoning, writing, diagnosing, coding, and problem-solving, and that trend isn’t slowing down. This isn’t a prediction dressed up as fact; it’s simply the direction things are moving. Within your child’s lifetime, and probably well before they finish school, machines will likely out-think most of us at most cognitive tasks we currently consider signs of intelligence.

I’m not saying that to alarm you. I’m saying it because it’s true, and because it changes a question every parent has been asking for generations, whether they realised it or not: “what should I be preparing my child for?”

The instinctive answer is to double down on cognition: more knowledge, sharper reasoning, better test scores, a competitive edge. But if machines are going to outsmart us regardless, that instinct is solving the wrong problem. If out-thinking them isn’t on the table, what does that actually mean for our children? Not how to compete with AI, but how to build the kind of character no machine can replicate.

An old answer to a new problem

Interestingly, about two thousand years before anyone imagined machine intelligence, a group of philosophers in Greece and Rome were already wrestling with a version of this question, just from a different angle.

The Stoics (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others) lived in a world defined by things they couldn’t control: political instability, illness, sudden reversals of fortune, the constant nearness of death. Their central insight was that almost everything you might anchor your worth to, your health, your reputation, your circumstances, other people’s opinions, is not fully up to you. What is up to you is how you think, choose, and act. Not what happens to you, but who you are while it’s happening.

They weren’t writing about artificial intelligence, obviously. But they were asking the same underlying question this moment is forcing on us: when the things you thought made you valuable turn out to be unreliable or outside your control, what’s left? Their answer wasn’t “get smarter” or “know more.” It was: become a certain kind of person. Not what should I know, but who should I become.

Cognition is not character

It’s worth being precise about the distinction, because the two get blurred constantly.

Cognition is information processing: recalling facts, following logic, solving problems, generating ideas, synthesising knowledge. It’s what standardised tests measure, what most schooling optimises for, and exactly what AI is getting rapidly better at. None of that stops being worth developing: a sharp, well-informed mind still matters, and always will. It just stops being what makes your child distinctly valuable, because it’s no longer scarce.

Character is different. Character is how someone acts when it costs them something: the honesty when a lie would be easier, the fairness when self-interest points the other way, the discipline when indulgence is right there, the courage when staying quiet is safer. Character isn’t about what you know. It’s about what you do, especially when doing it is hard and no one is grading you on it.

An AI system can process an ethical dilemma and produce a sound analysis of it. What it can’t do is live the choice: carry the consequences, feel the pull of the easier wrong answer, and choose otherwise anyway. That’s not a processing problem. It’s not a problem AI is trying to solve, and it’s not a gap that better models will close, because it isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s the difference between simulating a value and being the kind of person who holds one under pressure. Character requires having something at stake. AI has nothing at stake. Your child does.

The Stoic answer: four qualities of a good person

So if cognition is what’s being automated, and character is what isn’t, what actually constitutes character? The Stoics gave a specific, durable answer: four qualities that together describe not someone who’s merely capable, but someone who’s genuinely good. They called them the cardinal virtues.

Wisdom: not the accumulation of facts, but the practical judgement to see a situation clearly and know what actually matters in it.

Courage: the willingness to act rightly in the face of fear, discomfort, or uncertainty, rather than doing what’s easy or safe.

Justice: treating other people fairly, giving them their due, and taking seriously your responsibility to others, not just yourself.

Temperance: self-mastery, doing the right amount, at the right time, instead of being ruled by impulse or appetite.

None of these are about being smart. All of them are about being reliable, in the deepest sense: the kind of person whose goodness doesn’t depend on circumstances, incentives, or who’s watching. That reliability is exactly what doesn’t show up on a CV built around cognitive skill, and exactly what AI has no capacity to develop, because it isn’t something you compute. It’s something you become, through practice, over time, usually the hard way.

Where this is going?

This series isn’t about how to help your child out-think a machine. That’s a race with no finish line worth reaching. It’s about something the Stoics understood long before any of us had a reason to think about artificial intelligence: that a person’s worth was never really about what they knew or how fast they could think. It was about who they were.

The real question isn’t how do I prepare my child to compete with AI. It’s how do I raise a child whose humanity is undeniable: whose wisdom, courage, justice, and self-mastery are so evidently theirs that no measure of machine intelligence makes them any less essential.

The next posts in this series take each of the four virtues in turn and get practical: what they actually look like in the day-to-day work of raising a child, and how you build them deliberately rather than hoping they show up on their own. After that, we’ll look at what it takes to sustain that work over years, not weeks.

For now, it’s enough to sit with the reframe: the machines are coming for cognition. Character was never theirs to take.

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References & Further Reading

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
– Epictetus, Enchiridion (also translated as The Handbook) and Discourses
– Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium)
– William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (2009), a widely used modern introduction to Stoic philosophy and its four cardinal virtues
– John Sellars, Stoicism (2006), an academic but accessible overview of Stoic ethics, including the cardinal virtues

Later posts in this series will draw on contemporary psychology research relevant to each virtue in practice; those sources will be referenced in the posts where they’re discussed.

Why I Don’t Blog More and Why I’m Done Beating Myself Up About It

Why I'm Done Beating Myself Up About It — hand-lettered watercolor header — The tangle in my head, before I write it down.

I like blogging, and I’ve always fancied myself a blogger, which I realise is so yesterday, and dates me terribly. I’m not particularly good at it, and definitely not consistent enough. For a long time, that meant beating myself up over how little I post.

But I’ve come to a realisation recently: it doesn’t really matter.

Here’s the truth of it. A full-time teacher with a side of Principal Teacher is a lot of work. There simply isn’t time for everything: blogging, creating content to help my wife, woodworking, gaming, time with my family. During term time, the job consumes me, and it consumes my time. This isn’t a complaint. It’s the deal we make as teachers, and I’m at peace with that.

But back to the blog and that said (about time being the enemy), I’m about to start two series. One on what it means to be human and how we can prepare our children for the future, and another on how parents can help their children become better readers. I want people to see these, of course I do. But in the past, my metric of success would have been how many people read it. I’m not sure that’s the only metric that matters any more.

Here’s what I’ve realised: I do try to write about things I’m interested in, and that I think people will find worthwhile or useful. But more than that, I use my blog to think things out. Writing them down helps clarify my thinking in a way that thinking alone never does. That clarity alone is reason enough to keep me writing, though it’s taken me a while to see it that way. In the past, I’d have liked big numbers, lots of people reading my posts. That never happened, and looking at it now, I can see it for what it was: vanity. Marcus Aurelius spent a lot of time writing to himself about how quickly praise fades and how meaningless external applause is. I’d rather have the clarity than the applause.

So if people read it, great. If nobody does, that’s fine too. The value is in the process. At the very least, it gives me a clear space to think. Everything else is just a bonus: the archives, the record of my own growth, and any readers along the way.

Another New Chapter

At the end of June, another chapter in the adventures of the Galloway’s will come to an end, that being our adventure in Egypt. At the beginning of the month we decided not to renew our contract here at The British School Alexandria. It was a somewhat difficult decision in that we have made some very good friends here, we’re saving money and working in the Prep School has been a very enjoyable and for the most part, a rewarding experience. But there are several issues that, on balance, meant we didn’t want to spend another here.

One of the main reasons for this decision was the lack of access to high quality CPD. This is often an issue at international schools, especially small one’s like BSA. Returning to the UK will, hopefully, budget cuts aside, allow me to satisfy this particular urge, which will help me become a better teacher.

It wasn’t the only reason. The other main factor was that with a small family it is very hard to find things to do with out little guy. Funnily enough, our friends who have recently arrived from the Falkland Islands assure us that there is SO much to do here in comparison to where they have just come from. But still, for us, the difficulty just getting somewhere to do an activity is a hurdle we no longer want to overcome. The idea of being able to find an activity that doesn’t take 45m to get to and then 90m to get back from is very exciting. And don’t get me started on the quality of the provision…

Finally, and we knew this coming here, we’re not city people. We love the outdoors, fresh air and open spaces. Alexandria is not that. In fact, without travelling for at least an hour it’s difficult to escape the noise and pollution of the city.

These were the major drivers behind our decision to leave BSA at the end of the year. There’s still five months to go, but in the life of international schools notice has to be given early so that replacements can be found. Once January is over, (what is with January always seemingly an endless month, doesn’t matter where you are…) the time will fly by and we’ll be once again on the road looking for a place to call home. And that depends on a job.