William Bennett, who ran the Department of Education under Ronald Reagan, and Jon Hage, who runs one of the nation’s largest charter-school networks, come to Fox News this week to warn that artificial intelligence cannot shepherd a child’s soul. In their piece “WILLIAM BENNETT, JON HAGE: AI can mimic a teacher, but it cannot shepherd a soul”, they argue that AI is “inherently amoral,” cannot love a student, and that any model placed before a child must be filtered through age-appropriate safeguards aligned with the values of the families it serves. Their warning is earnest and their diagnosis is not wrong. The trouble is the men delivering it: they spent their careers dismantling the institutions that used to do exactly what they now say only a human teacher can do.
Four years on a rural school board teaches you what consolidation looks like up close. The parish of St. Leo’s, founded in 1884, was held together by the nuns and the farmers’ daughters who taught in the parish school for wages that would not have covered a Chicago coffee tab. The same reform movement that gave Bennett and Hage their platforms closed the rural schools, consolidated the county into a busing shed, and replaced the teacher who knew which child had lost a parent over the weekend with a screen that delivers a scripted lesson. The rooted teacher who lived in the community, taught your older child, and would know your younger one’s name before September ended was replaced by a charter-school network headquartered in Florida, answerable to no one who will ever set foot in the county. The human shepherd was gone long before the AI arrived.
Bennett and Hage warn that AI “cannot love a student, recognize the moment a child needs encouragement rather than information, or model integrity by doing right when no one is watching.” They are describing the very thing their own reform agenda expunged. The teacher who taught in the community she lived in, who carried the knowledge of which family had just lost its dairy herd and which child was sleeping in a car, who could not help but model integrity because she would see every parent at the grocery store and every student at Mass on Sunday — that teacher was the soul they claim the machine cannot replicate. The virtue they want the AI to be screened by was not abstract. It was embodied, particular, rooted in a place. They spent a generation and a half making it economically impossible for her to stay.
Now, I will grant the premise: a technology that can reason without a conscience is not something to hand a child unsupervised. Machines cannot love. They cannot model integrity. That is true, and if Bennett and Hage were just arriving at that insight today, it would be worth hearing. But they arrive at it from the address of the people who sold the embodied teacher for a test score, who standardized the classroom into a delivery system, who made sure the person who could actually do what they are now saying only a human can do no longer works at the school down the road.
The charter model Hage built and Bennett championed centralized, standardized, test-score-measured its way to a version of education that can be handed to an algorithm without much loss. The logic follows the same structure as a futures contract: bundle the product, standardize the spec, sell it forward, and let the distant buyer hold the basis risk when local conditions change. A curriculum delivered by a screen programmed in California and administered by a chain in Florida is already only a few quality-of-life updates away from being delivered by ChatGPT with a parental-control filter. The ethical guardrails they demand — the hard questions for the companies, the transparency about training data, the refusal to treat safety as an afterthought — would be fine if they had not already removed the guardrails that mattered: a teacher who lived down the street, a school board that could say no to a curriculum because the board members lived in the county, a parish school that did not need to optimize for standardized-test scores because the community trusted the nun.
Bennett has written the Book of Virtues. It is a fine anthology. But virtue is not a commodity you can standardize and trade. It is something you catch from being in the presence of people who have it, day after day, in a community that holds them accountable because it knows their name. The authors of this piece spent their careers building an education system that atomized students into data points and teachers into interchangeable content-delivery units, removing the community context in which virtue is actually taught. Now they are shocked that a technology built on the same logic — standardized, scalable, abstract, accountable to shareholders, rooted nowhere — cannot love a child.
The counter-model is not a better AI filter. It is a return to the thing they helped kill: a school that belongs to the town it serves, taught by people who live there, held accountable by parents who see them at the diner and at church and at the grocery store. That model is smaller, messier, harder to scale, and impossible to monetize. It is also the only setting in which a child has ever been genuinely shepherded. The AI is coming; I will not pretend otherwise. But the people who sold the shepherd should save us the sermon about the wolf.