On the Dignity of Learning

Last week I traveled up to Notre Dame to discuss the dignity of learning with 60 really awesome people invested in thinking through what it means to respect human dignigty in the classroom during our AI era. I’m thankful that I was able to deliver some opening remarks to start the conversation, which I’ve decided to share here below.

You can read more here about the DELTA network (which hosted the event) and the great work of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good here.

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Delivered February 3rd, 2026 in South Bend, IN

Every semester, in the first week of class, I ask my students one question: “Why are you here?” Over the ten or so years I’ve been teaching in higher education, politics have shifted, new technologies have emerged, and the trending cut of jeans has changed (I’m very much a fan of the baggy wide-leg thing going on right now)—but their answers have stayed remarkably consistent: to get a degree so I can get a job. Or, as one of my students said a few weeks ago with very big tech-bro energy: “I WANT A BOAT.”

Our students are in our classrooms—or so they may have come to believe—to consume content, to produce a degree, so they can become bigger, better consumers. Consumption. Production. Consumption.

This is what I call a thin anthropology: the idea that human beings are fundamentally consumers and producers; that our value lies in what we can produce and in the quality and quantity of what we can consume. And, alas, it is the anthropology that has been shaping the educational ethos for quite some time. Emerging technologies have only exacerbated it: faster consumption, faster production. Why wouldn’t that seem like an unqualified good—if that’s what human beings are?

No wonder the classroom has become increasingly commodified and utilitarian. Maybe all of this is because we have forgotten what we are.

So our task, if we want to dignify learning, must begin by boldly and unapologetically declaring what we are. Only then can we develop a real alternative to the consumption/production model that dominates our schools, universities, and classrooms.

I would be remiss to give a talk about education here at Notre Dame—especially for the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good—without reference to the late Alasdair MacIntyre, who, riffing on Aristotle and Aquinas, defines us human beings as dependent, rational animals.

To some, that may sound anticlimactic. But it is not in the least. To say we are dependent means we are fundamentally social. We can only thrive and flourish in community. To say we are rational means we can respond to reasons—we can ask not only what we want, but what is worth wanting. And to say we are animals means we are finite and embodied. Creatures that have limits. This, of course, means: we are not gods.

These undeniable realities are consequential. If we are fundamentally social, we need to learn how to live well with others: to be just in our actions and honest in our words; to practice patience in the face of uncomfortable slowness and difficulty. If we are rational—ordered toward truth, beauty, and goodness—we need courage to pursue and defend them, and practical wisdom to act in accordance with them. And if we are animals—finite, embodied, limited—we need temperance to restrain our passions, and humility to live with the sometimes painful awareness that we do not have the time or capacity to do everything. That we must rest.

These capacities—practical wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, humility, honesty, patience—are what philosophers call virtues. They are the excellences of human beings. Without them, we can’t flourish as human beings.

And here is the thing: they have to be taught. We are not born with such virtues. Just think back to the little hellion you were in the sixth grade and you’ll get your evidence of this. They are acquired, often painstakingly.

Our classrooms are always cultivating these excellences—or cultivating their opposites. Virtues are learned by doing, not by hearing. Forming honesty in the classroom isn’t just telling a student to be honest; it’s creating the conditions in which they can tell the truth—again, and again, and again. So they get accustomed to truth-telling. So disposed to do it in the right way that they are still inclined to do it when they are afraid or rushed or ashamed. Or when someone they love doesn’t want them to say it.

Bringing this all together, a formative humanistic education allows young people to become more human—to hone those excellences that make life go well for the kinds of things we are—dependent, rational animals. And to do that we must create conditions that allow students to practice the virtues they don’t yet have. The virtues they will need when giving an employee an annual performance review and when they try to soothe a screaming toddler on a plane—as many of you may know, this is surely the ultimate test of patience.

However, practice is just part of the story. In fact, practice is mere performance if it isn’t rightly motivated. Otherwise, it just appears virtuous without actually being so. At some point practice has to start being for the right reasons. The right reason, as Meghan Sullivan would have it (and I think she is right), is love. Love for truth, for neighbor, for the first things.

Sadly, this is not simply born in repetition. It must be awakened. This awakening happens, as Pope Benedict explains in Deus Caritas Est, through encounter. Love begets love. It is born in the recognition that you are worthy of someone’s time and attention.

Let me make this concrete, because I never imagined I would be giving a talk like this at a place like Notre Dame. I’m a first-generation college student. My dad worked maintenance at an apartment complex, and my mom cleaned other people’s houses on weekends to put me through Catholic school.

At that school I had a saint for a principal who knew my name and my story. And there we made many friends. I babysat for a single mother, [deleted name for privacy], after school got out. Her daughter was in my little sister’s class. She later, and anonymously, paid my tuition for all four years of high school.

At that high school the advancement director, Sue, sat with me and coached me when I had an interview for a prestigious academic scholarship to USF, where I now work. She told me how to enunciate my words and fold my hands in my lap and keep my feet on the ground as I spoke—things I still remind myself of each time I walk into some big meeting or interview.

And I got that scholarship, generously funded by a couple, Brad and Terry, who believed that potential needed close mentorship and attention to become actual—which is exactly what I received.

And while I was there at USF, I didn’t even take a philosophy course until my junior year, when I took Christian Ethics with Thomas Williams. He was an excellent professor who so carefully planned his lectures for all twelve of us in his class. After taking years of courses in giant lecture halls where no one knew my name, that class made me feel seen by someone I respected and admired—someone who thought I was occasionally insightful and who gave handwritten notes on my papers.

I share these examples because of what they communicated to me: that I was worthy.

And it was these encounters—the gift of attention that procured a sense of worthiness, given again and again—that made my becoming feel possible. It was communicated in the sacrifice of my parents. The investment of [deleted name for privacy] and the Holcombes. The mentorship Sue gave me along with my advisors at the USF Honors College. And Thomas’s handwritten scribbles on my essays.

But love alone is not enough, just as structure alone is not enough. Without structure, love collapses into sentiment or zeal. It cannot shape a will, or build courage, or cultivate honesty. And without love, structure becomes a mechanism for compliance. It trains students to perform virtue rather than become virtuous. A real education requires both: the scaffolding that yields discipline and the love that gives purpose and motivates. One without the other deforms. Together they dignify learning. Together they make possible the promise of human excellence.

Putting all this together, we might say: dignified learning is respectful of our very true and very real metaphysical biology—that we are dependent, rational animals. Fundamentally dependent on community, fundamentally drawn to truth, fundamentally in need of real limits and rest. We need that thick anthropology to sustain a thick philosophy of education.

And that thick anthropology isn’t about production and consumption. It is about who our students are and who they are becoming.

And our work as educators is to give the structure that makes such becoming possible—building the scaffolding for real excellence as dependent, rational animals.

But it also tells a young person again and again:
You are worthy of my time.
You are worthy of my attention.
You are worthy of being taught.

That is the dignity of learning.
It is up to all of us to make it so dignified.