Education is NOT about content transmission

Notes on an important lecture on the intellectual virtues in a time of AI

What are the implications of the rise of Artificial Intelligence on higher education? This is a question that no university can avoid. In the Busch School of Business we have begun what I hope will be a far-reaching process of reevaluating all of our teaching to ensure that we are making the best use of this new technology to prepare our students with the best possible intellectual and moral formation, so that they can flourish within this complex new reality.

Following the insightful recommendation of Busch School colleague Dr. Michael Pakaluk, we began with a discussion of the intellectual virtues, to ensure a proper understanding of what exactly we are doing as teachers. To kick us off, I invited School of Philosophy colleague Dr. Jonathan Buttaci to address the Busch School faculty on the topic of the intellectual virtues.

With Dr. Buttaci’s permission, I share below selected slides from his presentation, along with my own notes.

Anyone who is interested in what good education really looks like will benefit from reading this.

Education is not content transmission.

This statement is simultaneously shocking, and obvious. Shocking because it contradicts what the most influential minds in higher education today seem to believe, that higher education is about the dissemination of knowledge.¹ Immediately obvious because every teacher knows that good education is not about “pouring facts into our students’ heads.”

Nor, however, is education content transmission plus formation in the moral virtues of justice, courage, and self-discipline (what I call the super habits).

Could it be content transmission through the formation of moral and intellectual virtues? Perhaps, so long as we understand knowledge itself as an intellectual virtue (an excellence of the mind) to be cultivated.

Dr. Buttaci begins with a review of virtue.

Virtues are perfections of our distinctively human powers of (1) reasoning and (2) mastering our emotions. The intellectual virtues are the perfections of reason itself, while the moral virtues are what lead to mastery of our emotions.

Justice, courage, and temperance (self-discipline) are the principal moral virtues. Prudence (practical wisdom) is an intellectual virtue concerned with living out the moral virtues in practical action. Collectively, the four are the practical virtues.

There are three branches to the intellectual virtues: practical, productive, and theoretical.

All virtues, not just the practical ones, are developed through practice.

This next part is what really challenged us:

Theoretical knowledge is a virtue. Dr. Buttaci is not saying merely that knowledge is acquired through the exercise of virtue, but that knowledge itself is a virtue, a habit — a habit that perfects the human mind.

Knowledge is a type of seeing, and seeing through: navigating appearances to get to realities.

Even theoretical knowledge is a habit. Content is never really “transmitted” — content is rather the shape of a knowing activity that is cultivated in the student. Content — knowledge — is not like a book in your mind, it is more like a skill, a skill that equips the person to engage in a particular intellectual act.

The three theoretical intellectual virtues are understanding, science, and theoretical wisdom.

Understanding is the habit of knowing, grasping, the first principles of a particular discipline.

Students grow in the virtue — the habit — of understanding by practicing, for example, recognizing the implicit assumptions in a debate, recognizing natural causes in nature observations, or articulating the axioms of a mathematical or logical system.

The virtue of science (which is related to but shouldn’t be confused with science as a body of knowledge, or the scientific method) is the habit of reasoning from principles to conclusions, but always always in explaining the causes of things. It is the ability to explain why something is so and not otherwise.²

The virtue of science is developed by practicing, for example, distinguishing between knowledge and opinion, examining inferences, and reasoning hypothetically.

(And for completeness: the virtue of theoretical wisdom is the habit of knowing the highest causes of all reality).

My Own Conclusion

If Dr. Buttaci is right about intellectual virtue and its cultivation, then by recovering this richer understanding of what knowledge and education truly are — not the transmission of content, but the formation of intellectual habits — we are better prepared for both the challenge and the opportunity that AI presents. Seen this way, AI does not threaten education’s core mission, it clarifies it. By focusing on the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues, we are preparing our students to take advantage of the promise of AI and avoid its perils, both during their time with us and, especially, once they enter the business world.

1. For example, Michael Crow, long time president of Arizona State University and author of the influential Designing the New American University, in that book states that “the dissemination of knowledge will always remain the primary role of colleges and universities.” (p. 20).

2. This paragraph originally contained a typographical error. It stated that “The virtue of science ... is the habit of reasoning from principles to causes.” “Causes” was wrong. That has been corrected, effective February 4, 2026, and some additional elaboration added.