Prologue: Shortcut to Salvation, Shortcut to Freedom
Why Education Needs Its Own Reformation in the Age of AI
The Door
2025:
We hear the prompts running.
We watch our students—curious minds, struggling learners—hand over their thinking to machines that generate instant essays.
They think the output is the understanding.
They think the product is the process.
This is not the first time humanity has confused the receipt for the relationship.
Flashback: 1517
In October 1517, Martin Luther heard the coins dropping.
He watched his parishioners—poor farmers, struggling families—hand over money they didn’t have to buy paper certificates promising salvation.
They thought the receipt was the relationship.
They thought the transaction was the transformation.
This was a real jingle of the time:
“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
Luther nailed 95 theses to a church door, challenging the Church to return to the spirit and intent of its faith.
Flash Forward: 2025 (Return to Present)
Generative AI has done what indulgences did in 1517:
It has made the shortcut so obvious, so instant, so available, that we can no longer pretend we were doing the real thing.
The student has the essay.
But did they do the thinking?
The teacher has the grade.
But did learning happen?
Further still—
The teacher has given AI-generated feedback.
But where is the relationship of mentor to learner?
The school has the data.
But did transformation occur?
We have been selling receipts.
AI has revealed we were never demanding repentance.
The Last Hundred Years (Educators’ Warnings)
And this is the deeper tragedy:
For a century, America’s greatest voices in education have warned us.
They used different words—democracy, freedom, agency, questions, possibility—
but they pointed to the same truth:
Education is transformation through struggle, not transactions through shortcuts.
John Dewey (1916)
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
Maria Montessori (1949)
“The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’”
James Baldwin (1963)
“The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.”
Paulo Freire (1970)
“Education either facilitates integration into conformity or becomes the practice of freedom.”
bell hooks (1994)
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.”
These great minds agree:
The person must change, not just the paper.
And for a hundred years, we nodded—while building systems that valued the paper.
And let’s be honest: in the opening of this post, I implied that students are the ones transacting without transforming, using AI to generate essays. But the adults built the system they’re now navigating. The desks, the classrooms, the semesters, the grades, the credits, the diplomas—an entire architecture of compliance and record-keeping, not transformation and growth.
The Response
Out of love for truth and with desire to elucidate it, what will follow in the posts of this Substack are 95 theses for the reformation of education in the age of artificial intelligence. They are offered for debate, for dispute, for anyone who reads them.
If we meant what Dewey said—that education is life itself—then every choice we make about AI must ask:
Does this create life, or does it create a performance of life?
The coin rang.
The prompt runs.
The paper appears.
But where is the person?
This Substack is our door.
These posts in this series are our AI 95 Theses—not to make artificial intelligence the villain, but to claim responsibility for how our education system has fallen so far short of its promise.
In the name of learning, transformation, and human flourishing,
Wes Kriesel
November 2025