The Pope, Gandalf, and the Last Civic Spaces (Classrooms!)

The passage he chose, Gandalf's counsel to the hobbit Merry at the edge of despair, is worth reading and reflecting on:

"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till."

Then, Pope Leo adds his own line: "The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization."

The Tower That Is Already Being Built

The encyclical's organizing image is the Tower of Babel — and it is easy to see why it applies to the AI moment we are in. The biblical story is not, primarily, about ambition. It is about what happens when a single language, a single technology, and a single direction produce the collapse of communication rather than unity. When a civilization optimizes for power and scale, the result is confusion and dispersion rather than coherence.

Leo XIV has described something we are all too familiar with in our personal and professional lives: a technological ecosystem in which private companies, endowed with resources that exceed those of most governments, are shaping what billions of people see, hear, and believe — without accountability, without transparency, and without genuine concern for human dignity or the common good.

But what strikes us most about Magnifica Humanitas, and what we think gets underreported in the coverage: the Pope devoted an entire chapter to schools and the role of educators.

Chapter Four calls truth a "common good" and argues for what he describes as an "educational alliance for the digital age" — a recognition that if we are going to resist the forces that are fracturing how human beings know and communicate with each other, schools are where that resistance can be organized. He uses the phrase "ecology of communication" to emphasize that information environments, like natural ones, can be polluted, degraded, or restored. And that restoration is, in large part, a pedagogical project.

This is precisely what Or Initiative's research with students and teachers has been documenting – helping students navigate information environments and engage in discourse productively. In our interviews with 8th and 11th graders last year, students told us again and again that their classroom was one of the only places left where they could ask questions and change their own and each other’s minds.

"The whole reason we go to school," one 11th grader told us, "is not to give someone your opinion, but to help them create their own."

That sentiment is a description of democratic life. And it is exactly what the Tower of Babel — whether the biblical version, or the algorithmic one — is designed to make very hard.

Where the Tools We Need Will Be Co-Created

For both of us, our work with Or Initiative has reinforced lessons learned working in and with media and tech companies: technology deployed in classrooms without deep integration with what teachers and students actually need is not a solution. It is another source of noise.

What we have learned from thousands of teachers we have worked with, from early childhood educators to K-12 and higher education, is that the tools that work are the ones that students and teachers feel were built with them, not delivered to them.

The tools that don't work — and there are many — are the ones that optimize for the wrong things. Engagement metrics. Time on screens. Behavioral data extraction. Tools that make children feel like users instead of learners and explorers. The Pope's language about "dependencies and societal control" and "breaking the chains of new forms of slavery" is blunt, but it is, in our view, rather accurate. When a tool is designed to capture attention rather than cultivate it, it is working against the educational purpose it claims to serve.

The Walls We Are Building

Our integrated framework for how young people develop digital knowledge, build a shared evidence base on tough topics, and practice civil discourse together — is not designed as a single product or program. Rather, it is a set of interconnected pieces, each of which requires a specific kind of work from a specific kind of collaborator. The Or curriculum team, led by Dan Sigward and Rachel Sato are developing tools and lessons to build students’ digital literacy and civic discourse skills.  Jacob Steiss is leading a Professional Learning Community to (1) intentionally leverage the expertise of teachers to adapt these tools productively into their classrooms and (2) make it possible to sustain this work while avoiding burnout. By supporting teachers in meeting the challenges they bring up in ongoing monthly meetings with peers and by centering their rich knowledge of pedagogy and students, we are jointly constructing classrooms that combat civic discord, misinformation, and polarization.

The Clean Earth We Owe

Pope Leo XIV conveyed something profound with the passage he chose.

The despair Gandalf is pushing back against is the very specific despair of people who look at the scope of what they are being asked to resist — in Tolkien's case, the forces of Mordor; in ours, the forces of algorithmic fragmentation, teacher anxiety about external forces that are disrupting their agency, and the collapse of shared reality — and conclude that the problem is simply too large for ordinary people to address; the tides too powerful to master.

Gandalf argues that mastering the tides is not the assignment. The assignment is the fields we know. For teachers, those fields are their classrooms—and the students who walk in dysregulated by having scrolled through war footage between third and fourth period and are now expected to comment on Holden Caulfield’s apathy. Our goal is to accompany teachers into the fields as they do the incremental, yet compelling work of changing lives.

Teachers do something extraordinary and largely unrecognized every day: they maintain the last civic spaces where the Babel dynamic can be interrupted. Because their students can admit–I don't understand this, and I want to–and be met with an opportunity to grow into better selves, not an algorithm that has already decided what they should be and what they should believe.

Small, but powerful acts. That is what Gandalf called it. That is what we are trying to build.