Securing the Nation’s Future with Advanced Intelligences
AI is rapidly making traditional education models obsolete while threatening students' potential for self-determination. We're developing new approaches that harness AI to empower human creativity and discovery in the AI era through several initiatives: researching education's historical failures to enhance technical, cultural, and moral relevance; creating institutional models for flexible and locally-relevant education; fostering public engagement; and developing curricular frameworks.
At the heart of this effort is The Divinity School, an MA-level program that serves as a living case study—demonstrating how metacognitive perspective-taking is key to embedding AI education into higher learning. Beyond this, we are creating scalable models for all educational levels to ensure the next generation develops the cognitive tools necessary to navigate an AI-shaped world.
Through direct collaboration with municipalities on education design and strategy, we can transform local and national education systems. Our movement goes beyond critique to actively shape education's future through policy innovation, public discourse, and real-world implementation. This brief describes our initiatives.
Abstract
Throughout time leaders have forwarded the course of history. However, most remained trapped within their era's dominant narrative. In recent decades, when television and later the internet emerged, educational leaders abdicated their obligation to generations of students to the whims of the market and the egregious demands of the technological growth obligation. The results were tragic: intellectual stagnation, moral irrelevance, suppressed curiosity, and diminished creative experimentation. Now, with the rise of AI, if educational leaders merely fall in line once again, an even greater tragedy looms: the surrender of human identity and agency to machines. The technology itself isn't our doom—that hinges on how educators respond. We must teach young people to treat AI as a tool, maintaining intellectual distance and metacognitive awareness so it never becomes a super-subject to the self, but remains an instrument to be wielded according to each individual's authentic desires and choices. To do that we have to know how we got here. We will write a Security Brief to expose how the education system fundamentally failed in its mission during critical technological shifts - remaining passive while new communications technologies transformed Western values, capitulating as neoliberal bureaucracy strangled authentic learning, and standing idle while an aging ruling class, comfortable with institutional inertia, allowed government and Wall Street excesses to erode both public trust and the middle class.
Our purpose is twofold:
- Identify the key failure points in "the education system"
- Create an action-oriented response to elevate educational values above the technological drivers of society
Educators need to become leaders again— leaders who change the course of history by transcending the given reality of their times; leaders with penetrating vision who hold themselves to a higher purpose; leaders who ground the new generations in moral dignity. We must reclaim the sacred trust that society bestows on those who are responsible for the future of us all.
Developing Novel Futures
A Moment of Historical Significance
We are living in a moment of profound historical significance. The legacy of Western culture is being renewed, and at the same time, the geo-political landscape that will shape its future is being reconfigured. The national framework and its political architecture are being upgraded to secure technological dominance and uncontested power in the conflict arenas of the near future. For over a decade, the old guard of late-stage neoliberal capitalism was bending under its own bureaucratic weight, while an aging and increasingly clueless ruling class, comfortable with institutional inertia, enabled government and wall street excesses to pilfer both the public trust and destroy the middle class.
Economic Pain and Stolen Futures
While the ruling class and social elites spoke endlessly about "leveling the playing field," a new generation saw these policies as an assault on human agency. These revolutionaries, prioritizing real-world outcomes over ideology and academic rhetoric, highlighted how social inequality was actually increasing at unprecedented rates despite progressive programs.
As people felt economic pain, the government responded by injecting liquidity through carefully marketed stimulus programs. Though presented as relief for struggling individuals and small businesses, these programs merely masked deeper structural problems. The direct payments and incentives created an illusion of support while trapping recipients in long-term dependencies. Meanwhile, a select few in the financial markets reaped enormous gains. Young entrepreneurs with real-world business experience saw the truth: rather than revitalizing the economy, capital was being funneled upward into an increasingly centralized financial system.
This strategy followed a pattern as old as empire: when economic systems become unsustainable, those in power create short-term solutions that buy time while shifting long-term liabilities onto the public. Historically, nations dealt with runaway debt through expansion—securing new resources, exploiting weaker economies, or waging war to reset financial obligations. In the digital era, these tactics have evolved into algorithmic economic interventions, debt-financed stimulus, and privatization of public assets—mechanisms that keep capital flowing through elite networks while ensuring future generations remain financially subservient.
Yet public discourse remained trapped in superficial narratives, framing economic distress as merely a problem of insufficient redistribution rather than fundamental institutional failure. Those who penetrated this façade recognized that the ruling class wasn't simply mismanaging the economy—they were systematically stealing their future.
The Rise of the Technological Republic
Recent self-made technocrats have rejected geopolitics as a project of post-war humanism that aimed to create a global, cosmopolitan marketplace. Instead, they are returning to thinking generally in terms of western powers struggling to preserve western cultural norms and Judeo-Christian values against a growing threat of bad actors and terrorists; and more specifically, in terms of the United States, as securing and growing its unilateral powers against the backdrop of a compromised Europe and an increasingly complex theatre of multi-polar threats. As a combined result, a new technological order was germinating — what Palantir executives Alex Karp & Nicholas Zamiska would call The Technological Republic.
Those who rose up and constructed the technological order to drive the regime change, were not strangers to the elite colleges and universities, but dropouts and graduates who thought of themselves as “survivors.” They understood the system’s faults and weaknesses and talked freely about them – conversations that the authorities could not even have among themselves. They saw that the educational system had become intellectually bankrupt, ethically perverse, socially farcical, and politically impotent.
The purpose of writing the Security Brief is not to tell the story from the perspective of the people who emerged at the top of the technological tier to topple the ailing regime. Rather, our focus here is to examine what was happening in the schools, colleges and universities while this silent, but powerful, transformation of a nation was underway.
The next generation will not escape this cycle by relying on the same institutions that created it—they will need to build alternative models of learning, economic agency, and technological stewardship to chart a future beyond inherited dependencies.
The “knowledge economy”—of routine systematic cognitive work—is over. The next economy, if things go OK, will require meta-rationality to continually re-form fluid systems; agency to act above, on, and outside systems; and moral maturity to use power wisely.
~ David Chapman
Drives Versus Values
Culture Against Man
In his book Culture Against Man, Jules Henry describes drives as opposed to values:
“Drives are what urge us blindly into getting bigger, into going further into outer space and into destructive competition; values are the sentiments that work in the opposite direction. Drives belong to the occupational world; values to the world of the family and friendly intimacy. Drives animate the hurly-burly of business, the armed forces, and all those parts of our culture where getting ahead, rising in the social scale, outstripping others, and merely surviving in the struggle are the absorbing functions of life. When values appear in these areas, they act largely as brakes on drivenness.” [p.14]
The Technological Imperative
With this distinction in mind, it is easy to see that the technological imperative is a result of drives that emerged along with the digital revolution which placed power, wealth, and status within reach of some of the youngest members of society. These drives belonged to a new world — a world of rapid, global communications, hackers and coders, social media influencers, and mimetic warfare — a world where everything grows at exponential scale. As drives, they were out of sync with the larger set of values espoused by the universities, which had long ago divided the two and ignored their incompatibility.
The Transformation of Education and Values
This separation occurred during the last three decades, as the Western nations completed their transition from industrial-based economies to information-based economies. During that time, education changed its focus from teaching product-like skills they could hand off to children (reading, writing, 'rithmatic) — skills that could be put to good use as means in the pursuit of drives — to service-like skills that immersed students in a continuous stream of information processing (searching, retrieving, and compounding information) which served as "means-in-themselves," i.e., recursive processes that function without end goals.
Let's remember, however, that the "values" often alluded to by the technocrats were not, by Henry's distinction, "values" at all — they were technological drives. However, the problem was not the conversation around values per se, but that values were increasingly being processed like informational signals instead of being developed naturally by practicing culturally embedded behavioral norms that have been shaped by shared heritage and experience. Values-as-informational signals could be processed through methods such as data collection, measurement, ranking, prediction and control marking, and the like.
Values Become Information
The many crises we faced were boiled down to a matter of comparative values – those that were lost to modernity, those that developed with modernity, those that were set against modernity, and also those that were said to be emerging in a post-postmodern world.
Values Become Measurable
Psychologists started ranking values, organizations started measuring them, consultants started marketing them, politicians started debating them, and eventually, nations justified war with them.
Values Become Memes
The elite universities taught elite values by packaging them as inclusive, even though almost no one behaved in alignment with the values they purported to hold. Once values became indistinguishable from social memes, they became indistinguishable from mere information.
Values Become Weaponized
This transformation of values from lived experience to information played right into the hands of the technological opportunists, since information is something that technology can leverage, and as a result, social media leveraged the langauge of values in the form of mimetic warfare. The transformation was complete.
The Rise of Alternative Education
With the demise of the legacy media, the last decade has seen the rise of an entire alternative educational format in the form of internet podcasts. Most of these, however, have focused on political rumbles and feverish critiques of the espoused values of the “woke left.” These critiques of course were timely and necessary, and contributed substantially to the changing of the guard symbolized by the 2024 US election and the fiery aftermath “clean-up” operation that started immediately after the inauguration and continues to this day. However, education should not mimic this kind of cultural contention. It must look further ahead into the student’s future, and sink deeper into the care and commitment to the student’s unique potential — not only because that should be every teacher’s primary imperative, but also because the state will not serve the student’s best interests, it will only serve its own, in whatever form it mutates into.
Intergenerational education requires shaping the student’s learning experience to fit the very world that the new generation will be situated in. It is a moving playing field. Understanding intergenerational education means understanding the precarious relations of in-betweeness: the actors are situated in between worlds. This means education ought to be a series of continuous transformations as it pursues its goals: not only the re-invention of social drives, but also and more significantly, the ongoing evolution of social values. Just as the state can only see the “generalized citizen”, the “educational system” as a public institution, can only address the “generalized student.”
Only a true teacher can single out the unique self of the student and support the student’s authentic participation in a world that has yet to be born which nonetheless they will inherit.
Education in the Age of AI
Until the advent of powerful search algorithms, education had to store information in kids brains, essentially reducing most of them to LLMs, in the hope that a select few might actually learn the key principles at the foundation of a discipline, and be able then to regenerate it and take it forward. Today, this task, which children rightly experience as a kind of mental drudgery, can be handed off to the machines. With natural language as an interface, machines can take over not only the task of storing, searching and retrieval, but also the task of explaining and showing. The information economy is now closing its own loop. Today we need to look further ahead to the needs of children who will be born into this newfound reality.
A National Education Initiative
We need a national educational initiative that matters to the future of our youth — one that can leverage the power of technology for useful means and honest gains and also assure that it never usurps the power of the youth to define their own identity and pursue the futures they are wanting to build. We need to teach students not how to use technology— the interfaces will not only be seamless, intuitive and engineered to suit perfectly their developing minds — but first, how to avoid turning technology into a symbolic presence in their psychic imaginations, and secondly, how to manipulate technology as a tool, keeping it at arm’s length, “downstream” from their creative ideas and moral intuitions.
Metacognitive Skills
We will need to teach children the metacognitive skills to take technology as an object, despite its subject-like, anthropomorphic properties, and to recognize that technology is not a given in reality (a thing-in-itself) but envisioned, engineered and something to be continuously adjusted to ethical and moral ideals by human subjects. Without such skills, the technology we are building today will take on the aspect of being a super-subject to human beings, whose desires and choices will cease being the properties of our own second nature. Technology, however wrapped in social properties, must remain an object to be grasped by human subjects, for purposes instigated by human selves, and our authentic life-affirming values.
These metacognitive abilities—the higher-order thinking skills that allow us to understand, analyze, and control our thought processes rather than being controlled by external forces—will be essential for maintaining human agency in an AI-driven world.
We propose a national curriculum that produces basic metacognitive skills around AI in the same way that civic education focuses on reading, writing and arithmetic. We propose this project to be implemented in the way that Roosevelt rolled out the new deal, and the way that JFK launched the nation toward the moon — visions of the future that permeated and mobilized every aspect of the nation, were embedded in every aspect of education, and taught in developmentally appropriate stages to entire generations.
The Divinity School
Case Study #01
The Divinity School exists to fill this urgent need. We have identified two masters-level research tracks that will shape the pathways for education in the coming era of machine agency and enhanced intelligence: Naturalizing Machine Agency and Horizons of Biological Intelligence. Our students will engage in multiple year collaboratives to create new trajectories in a future where human intelligence must be able to choose wisely in an era of super-fast information processing, and technologically heightened agency.
Naturalizing Machine Agency
This track marks the distinction between human intelligence and machine agency, focusing on how to guarantee their alignment. We ask "What applications of AI best serve the lifeworld and help awaken people to the natural intelligence of the biosphere? We address concerns that AI will inevitably subvert human agency by capturing all our attention, and, as a result, accelerate existential risk. In this track, teachers and students will contribute to the development of an innovative approach to understanding AI as a valuable extension of human agency for beneficial ends. Their goal to weave together science, philosophy, art and engineering into a compelling articulation of "naturalized machine agency" that would redirect government interests and capital investments toward these ends
Horizons of Biological Intelligence
This track explores the emerging fields of cognitive science, collective intelligence, as well as synthetic biology that tell us that we may be underestimating the number of possible minded agents in the world and opens up the conversation to surprising new spaces of research. In this track, students and teachers will build, through innovative media, a compelling vision of how studying the under-explored realms of biological intelligence, including the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual horizons, can accelerate human development and restore our relationship to the natural world. Their goal is to redirect government interests and capital investments in research and to further education toward the emerging fields studying and developing the horizons of intelligence.
New Cognitive Sciences of Mind and Life
At the Divinity School, we are developing a curriculum centered on four fundamental powers of transformational leadership: Perception, Vision, Wisdom, and Action. These powers—or metacognitive capacities—form the foundation of our protocols for training great leaders.
- Simple observing to *perception* that avoids mistaking parts for wholes.
- Basic orientation to *visioning* with greater degrees of freedom.
- Decision making in terms of mere utility or instrumental values to *wise* choices based on first principles and core values.
- Actions that are performed *within* the arena to actions that operate *on* the arena and, as a result, change the nature of the performances therein.
This Masters Level curriculum is informed by the new cognitive sciences of mind and life, which have the power to transform the user, including:
- 4E Cognition, which reminds us that both the agent and the arena are constantly changing.
- Relevance Realization, which assures us we are focused on what matters most when selecting for values we want to amplify, while filtering out habits or properties we want to avoid.
- Pragmatic Imagination, which shows us how to move from deductive rationalism to abductive reasoning and beyond to the free play of the creative imagination.
- Cognition in the Wild, which points to deep capacities in our evolutionary inheritance we can reclaim to revitalize our cognitive toolkit.
- Reflexive Awareness, an ongoing wisdom practice that tracks and helps us be intentional about the kinds of selves we are becoming.
- Complex Potenitial States Theory, which shifts us away from thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems, which is epistemically suspect in the first place, toward a theory of change that works with fields of potential already operating in the system.
The Future We Must Shape
These are two areas of investigation that depend on ideation and research, vision and insight, that no AI has training data on, since it requires entirely novel ideas of what the future should be, given the unprecedented powers released by technology and the still unknown choices that human collective intelligence will deliberate together, through thought and action, governance and change. These are the issues that are up for grab in the coming decades:
- the definition of human.
- the vision of humanity.
- the definition of consciousness.
- the definition of intelligence and cognition.
- the role of feeling and emotion in decision making.
- the vitality of religion and religious community.
- the availability of spirituality and the spiritual life.
This question of what the future should be, must not be subject to technological drivers, but enveloped in the human project of an ongoing understanding of value— the questions not of what can we do, but what ought we do. In a world dominated by information and data, facing the intensity of a hyper-stimulated technological conomy that pursues its own recursive drives, this "ought" becomes a an imperative for engaging in a collective transvaluation of value.
In the meantime, the nation-state and its institutions, as well as the global order that was designed around them, are being deconstructed at an alarming speed. Yes, the old bureaucracy, was heading toward becoming a stale kind of control system that suffocated freedom with inertia and accumulated debt of all kinds — fiscal, legislative, regulative, and political— and therefore is overdue for radical overhaul. But technological quick fixes, focusing solely on "efficiency" and "returns" (understood in the pejorative meaning of those words), threaten to introduce new variants of authoritarian control — perhaps more dramatic than the old version, but also most likely more powerful, more insidious, and controlled by a much smaller cadre of elites who no longer are obsessed with political status that must court public approval, but instead, may be fueled by addiction to unchecked power, and become obsessed with enlarging their range of control.
These technocratic elites are wielding their power with great agency, yet with so little wisdom. Predictable rhetoric has been replaced by memes that are meant to shock us, but those too are quickly becoming predictable and hollow. The founders of the so-called "Technological Republic" may think of themselves as on par with the founding fathers who built the nation on the foundations of enlightenment values. In reality, the forcing factors they are running are technological drives that are displacing values in the national conversation. While much of this change in the regimen of politics is much needed and long overdue, we must be honest: this technological generation just doesn't have the foundational experience and requisite maturity to master such an enormous transition — namely, because their education failed them in this regard — and as such it looms over us as a collective failure, of failing to elevate human values over the technological drivers that have quickly and dramatically come to the forefront of history.
Coalition for Education in the Age of Agency
The education system is failing to equip people for an AI-driven future, turning them into passive information processors instead of independent thinkers. The past is prologue—earlier technological shifts (TV, internet, social media) eroded intellectual development while educators stood idle. Without intervention, AI will shape values instead of supporting human flourishing.
Like President Kennedy's moonshot galvanized a nation to achieve the seemingly impossible, we need a similarly bold educational initiative for the AI age. This is our generation's moonshot - not to reach the stars, but to ensure humanity's wisdom and agency flourish alongside artificial intelligence. The stakes are high: just as the Space Race determined technological supremacy, the AI race will determine the future of human consciousness and creativity.
This coalition is to support in advancing:
- The Security Brief: A highly-researched, narrative-driven work to change the conversation on AI & education.
- Divinity School: Representing at an MA l/evel what it means to build the kinds of metacognitive skills we advocate for across all levels of education.
- Policy Briefs: Synthesizing key ideas for policymakers and academic institutions.
- Pilot Program for Schools & Universities: A framework for education that supports metacognition on AI that can be implemented nationwide.
- Municipal and State level Education Design: Bringing together pioneers in advanced technology, policy, philosophy, and education to develop strategy that re-invents local education.