AI Is the Tool. Girls Are the Thinkers.

Around 1550, a scholar in Europe sat down at a desk buried in more printed books than one person could ever read, and despaired. That is not an exaggeration. A historian named Ann Blair wrote a book about it, called Too Much to Know. She found that scholars in the 1500s and 1600s complained about information overload in language that sounds a lot like ours.

 

The printing press had just made more books available than ever before in human history. No one could read them all, so scholars began compiling reference books: large collections of quotes and summaries drawn from hundreds of other books, organized so readers could find what they needed without having to read everything first. Those reference books were useful. They were also controversial. Some worried they would make readers lazy. If you could look something up in a reference book instead of reading the original closely, why bother with the hard work at all? The worry was that easy access to knowledge would weaken people's ability to actually think. This is not a new fear. People have worried about it every time a new technology changes how we get information.

 

I bring this up because I hear the same worry today, about AI, from parents and teachers I respect. Will a tool that can summarize, draft, and answer questions instantly make our girls worse thinkers? It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.

 

Here is what history shows. The best scholars did not stop using reference books, nor did they throw them out. They used them with discipline. They took their own notes on top of what they read. They judged which sources were worth trusting and which were not. They treated the reference book as a starting point, not a substitute for their own thinking. The flood of information did not let them off the hook. It just meant they had to be more careful about how they worked.

 

That is the approach we are taking with AI at Visitation. We are not pretending it does not exist, and we are not letting it replace the work our students need to do for themselves. We are teaching our girls to use it the way scholars have always used new tools: with judgment, with discipline, and without ever letting the tool think for them.

 

The technology is new. The task is old. Our girls will know how to use every tool available to them, and they will still be the ones doing the thinking.