How the Advent of the Printing Press is Relevant Today
History repeats itself, especially in the realm of disruptive technology. Knowledge and invention often progress incrementally, but sometimes a new technology destabilizes the world and accelerates our understanding of reality. In the Great Lessons, students learn that technologies like fire, language, and mathematics were among the most impactful things to happen to the human race. A more modern invention that changed how we process and express information was the Gutenberg printing press. *An interesting side note is the Chinese were using a printing press hundreds of years before the Gutenberg Press.
Interestingly, people did not agree on the validity or usefulness of the printing press. Some people feared how it might change humanity. Some worried that the availability of books would change what happened inside the mind. The underlying concern was that printed books would make people less dependent on their own memory, and therefore, intellectual effort. Print would “destroy memory” and “enfeeble the mind” because people were relieved of the need to memorize. A well-known example of this critique came from Hieronimo Squarciafico, a fifteenth-century Venetian humanist and editor who complained, “An abundance of books makes men less studious.”
Before print, books were scarce and expensive to reproduce. It could take a scribe about a third of a year just to handwrite one book. With the press, the real bottleneck became paper production, because books could be printed so much faster. It didn’t take very long for books to be everywhere and a fraction of the price they used to be. Then scholars complained that there were too many books! From his manifesto, An Idea of Mathematics (1638), John Pell complained that an overwhelming “multitude of books” confused his students because they were repetitive, poorly organized, and sometimes even contradictory. Scholars needed a way to discern valuable, correct information from noise.
The modern answer to this problem? AI. Instead of wading through too much information to comprehend, we have outsourced information dissemination to AI. Funny enough, the exact epistemological problem that emerged around print is now the same question we ask. “How do I know if this summary is correct?” The printing press made it possible for an error in one manuscript to become hundreds or thousands of identical errors. Now AI can confidently give you something completely wrong. The solution wasn't to stop printing, but to change systems like editing, citations, and peer review. The technology changed the epistemic environment, so humans had to develop new intellectual habits. That's precisely what we'll have to do with AI.
Johannes Trithemius, a German Benedictine abbot in the 15th century, influential in cryptography and bibliography, worried that printing would make monks intellectually lazy and argued that hand-copying manuscripts had intellectual and spiritual value that mechanical reproduction could not replace. Today, we say that AI makes students lazy and will destroy writing (and the process of thinking about writing). These arguments are not unfounded. Just as people once thought we would lose our ability to memorize, others argue that AI will cause us to lose our ability to think. Looking back in history, transformative technology can be both extraordinarily beneficial and genuinely destructive, depending on how humans reorganize their practices around it. Our job is to identify which skills to keep, which to outsource, and what to develop.
“Would Montessori Approve of Generative AI?”
I don’t think this is the way to frame the question because it immediately goes to looking for quotes, checklists of Montessori-approved materials and technology, and so on. If you read my blog last week or are an avid fan and historian of Dr. Montessori, you know about her early work with the labor movement and women’s rights. Montessori understood the labor movement as a push to change the conditions under which humans work, not simply to make harmful conditions tolerable. I think this gives us a unique way to use Montessori as a framework for deciding what AI should do. What work is essential for human development, and what work can AI remove the burden of?
The biggest question mark in education is how AI will change the conditions of work in school, particularly for students doing work for their development. If we are willing to be bold, AI will force us to decide which work is worth doing in the first place. The value of work is not merely that something was produced. The process of the person doing the work has inherent value. So we must distinguish between productive work and developmental work. The old problem was that industrialization made humans more machine-like, but now machines are becoming more capable of human intellectual work.
What kind of environment does AI create for the child? I’d argue the biggest threat isn’t cheating; it’s that they will use it to avoid the work necessary for their development. For an adult, AI eliminating a tedious task may genuinely be liberating. But for a child, the work itself may be the point. We must differentiate work that produces something from work that produces the person. Unfortunately, AI is very good at both, so we have to become much more intentional about work that produces the person. Because if Montessori is right that work is one of the ways human beings construct themselves, then the arrival of AI doesn't make work less important. It makes choosing the right work more important than ever. I’m not worried about AI replacing work; I’m worried about AI replacing agency.
To take a Montessori spin on a John F. Kennedy quote, “Don’t ask what AI can do for the child. Ask what the child needs to do for themselves.” Montessori had her own famous quote about this: “Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.” Montessori was referring to the adult in this case, but you can easily substitute AI. AI is basically an extraordinarily powerful “I'll do that for you” machine. If the child always lets AI do it for them, they may never discover they could do the work themselves. If work is part of how human beings construct themselves, then outsourcing developmental work isn't liberation; it's preventing development. We must always question what kind of work AI is replacing.
What’s interesting about AI is, to use it well, you increasingly have to think about your thinking. A sophisticated AI user must formulate a question, identify what they actually want, provide relevant context, recognize ambiguity, evaluate the response, ask a better follow-up question, compare competing answers, identify errors, refine the problem, and ultimately exercise judgment about the result.
That's highly abstract cognitive work. You can't effectively exercise those abstract skills without developing the concrete knowledge and experience underneath them. A child who uses AI to answer a question they don’t have concrete knowledge and experience with may get the solution but won’t understand what the machine is doing. AI cannot replace the concrete experience that makes abstract thinking possible. Our sensorial experience with concrete material builds the ability to represent it with symbols, language, and numbers. From there, we use our powers of reasoning and the scientific process to work in the abstract. In a kind of full-circle moment, AI can be considered a new material for developing abstraction. Ironically, this would make concrete education even more important, not less.
If Montessori is a method for observing human development, experimenting with the environment, and revising our practice based on what we discover, then AI isn't necessarily a threat to Montessori. It may be one of the greatest tests of whether we actually believe in Montessori as a living method rather than merely a collection of materials. We may have a revolution in education because AI could remove barriers preventing access to learning. Our work as educators is not to remove the struggle that is learning, which is the developmental work. We must ask, “When should a developing human use it?” I believe the answer lies in Montessori’s work on the Planes of Development.
The Four Planes of Development
Could the emergence of AI reveal something about the developmental work of the fourth plane that we haven't fully articulated?
The four planes are traditionally understood as:
· 0–6: construction of the individual
· 6–12: construction of the reasoning/intellectual self
· 12–18: construction of the social self
· 18–24: maturity, identity, independence, and finding one's place in society
The fourth plane is the first in which the person is supposed to function as an adult in the world. The first three planes are largely about how we construct ourselves, but the fourth plane says, “I’m constructed; what am I going to do with myself?” However, it’s not as simple as saying “No AI until 18.” A 14-year-old could have sophisticated expertise in one area and a very immature understanding in another. Likewise, a 22-year-old could use AI in a profoundly dependent way. It’s tricky, but instead of looking at age, we should look at what developmental work the person needs to do. This nuance makes policy frustrating because sweeping measures are easy to create and enforce, but don’t accomplish the goal we're striving for. If the child is still constructing foundational knowledge, AI should mostly stay out of the way because they need concrete experience. If the child is developing abstraction: AI can increasingly become a tool for exploration, comparison, and questioning. If the adolescent is developing social understanding: AI can become something to critically examine, debate, and use collaboratively. If the young adult is entering the fourth plane: AI can become an extraordinarily powerful intellectual tool. I’d argue that AI gives us super-abstraction powers, which makes human judgment more important because we must be able to direct the machine. Effective prompting is the ability to formulate thought. The better you understand something, the better questions you can ask.
At what point in human development does AI become an appropriate material? Age matters because Montessori's planes of development already recognize that human needs change qualitatively as development progresses. Age wouldn’t be an arbitrary technological cutoff but a proxy for developmental readiness. We don’t let children drive a car simply because they are tall enough to reach the pedals, so we shouldn’t give a child AI simply because they can ask it a question. Using the Montessori Planes of Development as my guide, here is my working hypothesis for the framework we could use to establish readiness.
In the First Plane of Development (0-6), there should be no AI. This is a no-brainer. The child is constructing the foundational human being through direct interaction with the environment. This includes sensorial, movement, language, real objects and people, concentration, independence, and practical life. Why would we give an artificial intelligence to a child whose fundamental developmental task is learning to interact intelligently with reality? The child doesn't need a machine that generates abstractions. They need to experience the world.
For the Second Plane of Development (6-12), for the first half, no, and for the second half, limited experimentation. The elementary child is developing the capacity for reasoning, imagination, and abstraction. But that doesn't mean we should immediately hand them the ultimate abstraction machine. It’s quite the opposite. We should be building the intellectual foundation that will later allow AI to be used intelligently. Instead of asking AI to write a report, the child can explore questions like: “How does an AI know this?” “Can AI make mistakes?” “Why did it give two different answers?” “How could we test whether it is telling the truth?” Perhaps AI can appear as an object of study before it appears as an intellectual prosthetic.
For the Third Plane of Development (12-18), I believe we have the first legitimate use cases because the child is increasingly sophisticated. Adolescents interrogate ideas, compare perspectives, argue, model systems, explore hypotheticals, generate questions, test hypotheses, critique, and collaborate. In this plane, students must develop a strong sense of AI ethics because they’re not only developing intellect but also their relationship to society. AI becomes a subject within Cosmic Education as students grapple with what this technology means for humanity.
For the Fourth Plane of Development (18-24), this is an intellectual partnership with AI that constantly asks, “Can I use this enormous intellectual power without surrendering my intellectual independence?” AI is a tool that can radically amplify their ability to think and produce, but the danger is dependency. An adult could become intellectually dependent upon AI in the same way a child could become dependent upon an adult. A way to gauge our AI readiness is our ability to use AI without surrendering the work that belongs to you. Can I maintain agency over the machine?
When we think of Montessori materials, we think of something that helps the child understand an abstraction through concrete experience. If AI is a machine for manipulating abstractions, then we use AI to help us turn abstraction into reality. AI-generated abstractions ultimately have to be tested against the real world.
Back to the Printing Press
The printing press essentially said, “You don't have to remember everything. It's written down.” The computer said, “You don't have to calculate everything.” The internet said, “You don't have to know where everything is. Now AI says, “You don't necessarily have to formulate everything yourself. I can help you think through it.” The printing press didn't eliminate the need for reading. It made reading more important. Once books became abundant, knowing how to read wasn't enough. People had to decide what to read, discern trustworthiness, analyze, compare, and ultimately decide what to believe. AI may do something similar to thinking. If machines become extraordinarily good at generating answers, then merely producing an answer becomes less valuable.
What becomes so much more valuable is asking the right question, knowing what matters, recognizing nonsense, making judgments, connecting ideas, having firsthand experience, understanding consequences, and ultimately deciding what is worth doing. The debate is not whether children should or shouldn’t use it, but instead how AI may create a new stage in humanity’s relationship with abstraction. The first plane needs experience. The second plane needs to build knowledge and reason about it. The third plane needs to understand society and its own place within it. The fourth plane may increasingly involve using extraordinary intellectual tools to contribute to the world without surrendering intellectual independence.
The printing press changed the information environment. AI is changing the cognitive environment. Montessori's contribution may be helping us design the developmental environment around it. I’m actually very optimistic for the future of Montessori education and AI. If machines become extraordinarily good at manipulating abstractions, then humans may increasingly need something machines don't possess in the same way: direct experience of the physical and social world. Gardening. Building. Sports. Cooking. Measuring. Drawing. Music. Experiments. Interpersonal communication. Conflict Resolution. Care for the environment. This isn’t old-fashioned; it acknowledges that human intelligence is grounded in experience. The more abstract our machines become, the more important it may be for children to have concrete experiences.
As Montessori educators, we should also ask a very different question about AI, because another possibility exists. What if we use an abstraction machine to help create better concrete experiences for human beings? AI doesn’t have to be the answer giver, or even the teacher, but instead a teacher’s material-making assistant. Too often in Montessori, we treat the materials as if they are finished artifacts. Montessori did not see herself as a saint whose materials came from on high and must be faithfully reproduced. She was a scientist who observed, developed material, observed, modified the environment, and repeated the process. Montessori's concern was not simply preserving a particular environment but changing conditions to better serve human development.
What does this look like practically? AI could generate 20 possible material designs, and the teacher rejects 18. However, she is intrigued by two, so she builds them and tests them. She observes the children, takes one of the designs, modifies it again, and tests it again. This is the core of the Montessori Method: an experimental process. AI may simply make the iteration cycle dramatically faster.
We know how busy you are as a teacher, and one of AI's biggest benefits is the legitimate cognitive relief of outsourcing certain work. A mathematician using a calculator isn't necessarily losing mathematical thinking. A writer using spellcheck isn't necessarily losing writing. A researcher using a database isn't necessarily losing research. An architect using CAD isn't necessarily losing spatial reasoning. And if you are like me and wear very different hats at your school, the administrative side of being an athletic director would be all-encompassing if I were not leveraging AI for email generation, scheduling, etc. Getting the admin work out of the way gives me time to focus on what I’m really interested in, like researching traditional Indigenous sport and creating new games that integrate with the classroom.
I love to teach through games and simulations, and at their core, they are designed experiences. I create situations where the child has to discover or use the concept. I refuse to separate cognitive development from physical development. A science concept can become a game. A mathematical relationship can become movement. A cultural study can become a traditional game. A social concept can become a team challenge. A historical idea can become a simulation. I believe the best way to learn is by doing. I treat the PE classroom as another prepared environment for intellectual, physical, and human development. I try my best to follow in Montessori’s example of observing human development, experimenting with the environment, and revising our practice based on what we discover. And I’m grateful that all of you have joined me on this grand experiment called Montessori Physical Education.