David Brooks has spent decades writing about character and how it's built. His latest piece in The Atlantic points that same lens at AI, and lands on a bracingly simple argument: "When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable."

When anyone can summon a competent answer in seconds, the differentiator stops being how smart people are and becomes their relationship to mental effort, whether they lean into hard thinking or hand it off. Brooks borrows the psychological term "need for cognition" to sort us into three camps: people who relish a hard problem, "cognitive misers" who avoid one, and a large middle who'll dig in only when they care enough. His warning is that AI could split that middle apart — some using the tools to think more, others quietly thinking less.

Writer Katy Purviance taught in a conventional classroom before founding the Spokane Learning Co-op — an outdoor, self-directed education center in Washington state. In this recent post to her Substack blog, she draws on decades of curiosity research, including work from Williams College's Susan Engel, arriving at an uncomfortable but important claim: kids arrive at school full of questions, but that curiosity collapses within a few years. This is not by chance either, but through grading that rewards compliance, stress that impairs the thinking brain, and the labeling of curious kids as "problems."

Strip away the debate on schooling, and what's left is this: curiosity drives deep learning, and agency has to be built or it withers. Purviance offers a few simple shifts to aid in rekindling curiosity and agency — swap phrases like "that's wrong" for "tell me more about how you got there," treat learner and team questions as worthy of consideration, and cultivate space for the group to examine and unpack each other’s questions. Though she's writing about young learners, these apply just as well to teams, or to our own journey.

We should note that since Purviance runs her own self-directed education center, she argues hard for that model over conventional schooling. Take this piece as a reminder of what we can do to build agency in any context, not an indictment of all formal education.