Deep in the Machine
By Stuart Grauer

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
— E. E. Cummings

I got a letter last week from one of our school board members. He had just read that Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs as part of a massive restructuring made possible by artificial intelligence (AI). He wrote: “We’d better make some changes to our curriculum to prepare our kids for what’s coming—I mean, what’s already underway.”

He’s right, of course, that something is underway. But it’s not just happening at Amazon. It’s happening across every field, every school, and every dinner table conversation about what kids “should” be learning now. The risks of AI are surrounding us. Like we’re victims, trapped deep inside the machine.

What can a school do? Let’s dig into that question.

Philosophy

The Grauer School's Learn by Discovery® approach enables students to pursue their natural inclinations—those sparks of curiosity that, when followed, become lifelong learning.

And yet, school can’t mean just chasing curiosity all day. We balance that freedom to search with a living canon and curriculum—values development, scholarship, and preparation for life or college.

We’re not training employees, even for Amazon! We’re cultivating people capable of seeking, appreciating, and creating a better world—or at least not being left behind by it.

This world is changing fast. But the great education, like agriculture, is regenerative to sustain life. The Grauer School, whether we all know it or not, is part of a quiet movement saying: if nature must regenerate to survive, so must schools. We are not governed by outside standards and bureaucracies: we are governed by imagination. Large-scale social change begins when small-scale efforts start connecting. And AI can either ruin that change or empower it. Here is how…

1. AI Literacy Without Losing Our Humanity

If AI is reshaping how every company operates, that’s okay. Because AI is, at its core, reading — a vast choose-your-own-adventure on steroids. Literacy in this new age means creativity, curiosity, and truth-seeking, not control — and not being controlled.

AI poses massive risks, it’s true. But it can also be an extraordinary learning partner — never a replacement for thought. It can be our personal Socrates, a space where curiosity knows no bounds. If our schools and teachers guide it that way. That will take real deliberation and great teaching, for which the small Socratic school model could be uniquely equipped.

In this more deliberate teaching space, AI is not the place to get better answers; it’s the place to practice asking better questions towards more unique searches. That’s nothing new — it’s how we’ve always treated technology: as a tool for exploration, not an oracle.

The teaching challenge we have before us is to help students (and ourselves) learn to use AI for discovery, not dependency. Cast in this way, as the great teachers will cast it, it can become a place to test ideas, accelerate insight, and express creativity — to receive all the feedback students want and more. Infinite feedback for the endlessly curious.

When guided by curiosity and conscience, students can channel AI for genuine learning and growth. By the way, our surfers use the waves for the same reason.

This holds beautiful meaning for us as teachers and parents: a student’s ability to ask questions — of us or of AI — now matters more than answering the ones we pose. The ultimate homework is discovering which questions they most want to pursue.

Those who fear AI most are those who believe any course of study primarily consists of a set of answers rather than a beautiful field to be discovered. AI feeds intrinsic curiosity infinitely; those with insatiable curiosity will gain the most intelligence.

2. Protecting and Elevating Human Skills

As companies automate, the qualities that make us human become only more precious: Leadership. Empathy. Humor. Storytelling. Listening.

These are the abilities machines cannot replicate. Our passion for learning is ours alone, irreplaceable, except by depression.

When I walk into a classroom, I can tell immediately whether connection and thriving are happening—or not. If students are passively receiving information, AI can do that better. Maybe that’s what our board member was afraid of. But no great teacher is.

We’re on this planet to connect and to thrive. That is the measure.

3. Entrepreneurial and Ecological Thinking

When Amazon’s CEO says he wants to run “the world’s largest startup,” he’s describing a future where agility replaces hierarchy. Education can do the same—and our school was founded for precisely that reason. The old hierarchy of teacher as fountain and student as receiver is gone. I don’t miss it a bit.

I want us to run the world’s smallest startup—the most agile one—a place of passionate curiosity.

We invite students to design, test, fail gracefully, and try again. Whether that’s a sustainability project, a student-led business, or a social initiative, they learn to think like founders and creators, not followers. And there is no end to how much they can ask as they find that path.

Just as important: innovation must follow nature’s patterns—cycles of growth, renewal, and interdependence. The original startup was the natural world’s ecosystems. That will always be true, on any planet!

4. Teaching Systems Thinking Across Disciplines

At The Grauer School, our expeditionary and inquiry-based projects naturally cross boundaries. A physics lesson becomes a study of ocean currents, which becomes an exploration of alpha waves, which becomes a study of mind and brain.

A literature class morphs into an analysis of communication bias that evolves into a student protest or proposal.

These are examples of systems thinking in action—of education as a living, regenerating network.

The Grauer School's weekly newsletter is practically a chronicle of holistic, regenerative education. If you ask me, it could be the syllabus for a graduate course on the future of learning. It illustrates the networks: We are the pursuers—the actors.

5. Cultivating Career Resilience and a Sense of Purpose

Curiosity is courage, and vice versa. As AI eliminates certain roles, the future belongs to those who can invent their own paths. The curious shall inherit the earth.

That doesn’t mean chasing the next marketable skill—it means knowing yourself, trusting your values, and adapting your purpose as you go.

Just last week, a Grauer alumnus, Jack, told me over lunch about his new career as a ski lift mechanic. He described the scent of oil and pine, the rhythm of gears turning under snowlight, and the quiet satisfaction of a day’s work high in the mountains.

We can imagine three ways to interpret such a path: (1) he was fated to sweat the gears, deep in the motor house beneath the grinding bullwheel, trapped in servitude to machines, (2) he had found practical and steady employment in a solid field, or (3) he had found a life lived close to the earth, breathing its sweetest air, while enabling people from all over the world to experience the splendor of the natural world.

Whether he felt trapped or free depended, as it does for all of us, on the cast of his own mind (and this is a micro-chapter in and of itself). As a Grauer graduate, Jack knew exactly which of those three he was in for: the third, with a splash of the second. His eyes were pure light as he described it. His perspective is available to every student as they find their way and interpret their own life.

Jack recognized that school had prepared him to grasp that kind of fulfillment, and the joy of this was matched by his gratitude. Those who learn by discovery—who listen, adapt, and care—will find work worth doing. Even in an automated world that threatens freedom, our curiosity as we seek larger values and purposes keeps us free.

A Better World

We stay relevant by doubling down on what matters most: curiosity, kindness, and courage.

Amazon may be reorganizing to move faster. So be it. Our task is to help students slow down. To reflect, connect, and discover what they love.

Teachers who honor that, whose tolerance for digression is vast, whose questions are better than their answers—those teachers are the gold standard.

“There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”
— Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another

If AI is the most transformative technology since the Internet, then unbound student and teacher curiosity can become the most transformative human enterprise since AI.

That’s the work.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The machines keep learning faster. Our work still begins the same way it always has: Learn by Discovery®.