What AI Is Teaching Us About Teaching

We Don’t Need to Make Our Students Smarter. We Need to Teach Them to Read Differently.

Here’s the thing about AI that Jewish day schools need to reckon with: It’s not replacing us. It’s revealing us.

And maybe -- just maybe -- it’s giving us the most important wake-up call education has had in decades.

Let’s back up.

In the beit midrash (Hebrew for "house of study/learning"), our students learn that every word matters. That how a word is used, what’s next to it, what it reminds us of, and what it doesn’t say -- that’s where meaning lives.

A pasuk (verse or sentence of text) isn’t just a sentence. It’s a lattice of associations: Halachic (pertaining to Jewish law), poetic, moral, mystical. The sages knew this. That’s why Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Ramban can all read the same verse and find different truths.

Jewish learning has always assumed that knowledge is not singular, that understanding lives in relationships, between ideas, between people, between past and present.

Sound familiar?

That’s exactly how a large language model (LLM) works.

We keep asking the wrong questions 

Most school conversations about AI fall into two camps: the tech enthusiasts who want students to integrate it into their learning, and the traditionalists who worry it’s going to short-circuit critical thinking.

But neither group is asking the right question.

The question isn’t: Should our students use ChatGPT? 

The better question is: What does it teach us about how students learn in the first place?

Because here’s the quiet truth: AI works by mapping relationships. It doesn’t “know” anything; it just sees how ideas show up together across culture and time.

It’s not intelligent. It’s interconnected.

And maybe that’s a better model for how we teach.

From content to context 

For decades, school has been built on a model of content delivery. Even when we talk about “21st century skills,” we often mean ways to make the same information more engaging.

But AI doesn’t just retrieve content. It reveals context. It shows the pathways by which ideas are connected, and that’s where we should be focusing our energy.

Because if a chatbot can write a decent five-paragraph essay in three seconds, maybe the point was never the essay.

Maybe the point is:

• Can a student ask a better question?

• Can they understand what’s being assumed and what’s being left out?

• Can they trace the implications of an idea across disciplines, cultures, or centuries?

That’s what learning looks like now. And honestly? That’s what deep Jewish learning has always looked like.

The role of the human 

There’s a midrash that says God looked into the Torah and created the world.

That’s not a tech metaphor, but it could be. Because that’s what we’re doing when we build or prompt these tools. We are crafting worlds out of language, data, and desire. These machines don't teach our students what to think, but they can reflect back to us how we think.

So our job as educators isn’t to compete with the machine.

It’s to help students understand what the machine is doing, and what it can’t do.

It can remix ideas. It can generate summaries. It can mimic brilliance.

But it cannot choose what matters. It cannot weigh values. It cannot locate purpose.

That’s our job.

New literacy, ancient roots 

We need to teach a new kind of literacy -- one that doesn’t just ask students to write, but to read the world. To see how narratives form, how ideas cluster, how biases hide.

In other words, we need to make students rhetoricians, not just in the classical sense, but in the Jewish sense.

Interpreters. Link-makers. Meaning-makers.

And we, as educators and school leaders, need to stop treating AI like a tech tool on the side. It’s a mirror. It’s a map.

And yes, it’s a megaphone.

So what do we want it to reflect?

What do we want it to amplify?

What story of Jewish education are we building -- intentionally, thoughtfully, creatively -- so that these tools help deepen learning instead of flatten it?

The future isn’t machine-made. But it will be machine-shaped.

Let’s make sure our students, and our schools, are ready to shape it back.