Lance — I was supposed to be at this talk. My business partner Todd was there at Babson and we were meant to connect. Life got in the way, but I’m glad I found this post because you’re asking the exact question I built my entire framework around.
I teach chemistry and physics at David Prouty High School in Spencer, MA — the same district that’s partnered with MIT RAISE and co-hosting the Youth AI Festival at MIT this July. Every day I watch students produce beautiful AI-assisted work they cannot explain or defend under a single follow-up question. The output looks like mastery. The architecture is hollow.
Your question — “who is doing the thinking here?” — is the question I couldn’t stop asking. So I built an answer. The Cognitive Architecture Pyramid is a six-layer diagnostic framework that sequences what must exist inside a student’s mind before AI becomes a tool that extends thinking rather than replaces it. Attention. Encoding. Internal knowledge. Conceptual thinking. Metacognition. Then — and only then — AI synthesis at the top.
You said it perfectly: if students only learn how to use the tool, we’ve failed them. And if we pretend the tool isn’t there, we’ve also failed them. I’d add a third failure: if we never verify whether the student can think independently before handing them the tool, we’ve built the illusion of progress on a hollow foundation.
I wrote a book about this — Cognitive Sovereignty Under Compression — and was the April cover story in STEM Magazine on “The Integration Gap.” I’d love to connect. I think what you’re doing from the philosophy and ethics side and what I’ve built from the classroom and diagnostic side are two halves of the same conversation.
That tension between genuine curiosity and uncritical adoption is something every educator I know is navigating right now. "Awe without surrender" is such a good way to put it. The teachers who stay grounded tend to be the ones asking what the tool actually does to the learning experience, not just whether it saves time. This is the kind of framing more professional development sessions desperately need.
Lance — I was supposed to be at this talk. My business partner Todd was there at Babson and we were meant to connect. Life got in the way, but I’m glad I found this post because you’re asking the exact question I built my entire framework around.
I teach chemistry and physics at David Prouty High School in Spencer, MA — the same district that’s partnered with MIT RAISE and co-hosting the Youth AI Festival at MIT this July. Every day I watch students produce beautiful AI-assisted work they cannot explain or defend under a single follow-up question. The output looks like mastery. The architecture is hollow.
Your question — “who is doing the thinking here?” — is the question I couldn’t stop asking. So I built an answer. The Cognitive Architecture Pyramid is a six-layer diagnostic framework that sequences what must exist inside a student’s mind before AI becomes a tool that extends thinking rather than replaces it. Attention. Encoding. Internal knowledge. Conceptual thinking. Metacognition. Then — and only then — AI synthesis at the top.
You said it perfectly: if students only learn how to use the tool, we’ve failed them. And if we pretend the tool isn’t there, we’ve also failed them. I’d add a third failure: if we never verify whether the student can think independently before handing them the tool, we’ve built the illusion of progress on a hollow foundation.
I wrote a book about this — Cognitive Sovereignty Under Compression — and was the April cover story in STEM Magazine on “The Integration Gap.” I’d love to connect. I think what you’re doing from the philosophy and ethics side and what I’ve built from the classroom and diagnostic side are two halves of the same conversation.
smalaxos.substack.com
That tension between genuine curiosity and uncritical adoption is something every educator I know is navigating right now. "Awe without surrender" is such a good way to put it. The teachers who stay grounded tend to be the ones asking what the tool actually does to the learning experience, not just whether it saves time. This is the kind of framing more professional development sessions desperately need.
Hey — I came across your writing and really liked how you think.
I’m exploring something similar from a different angle — writing about human behavior through a system design lens (like debugging internal patterns).
Just started publishing on Substack. If you ever get a moment to read, I’d genuinely value your perspective.
Also happy to support your work — feels like there’s an interesting overlap here.