Image: We live in a time in which more and more often, people are questioning why there are humans doing the work that a machine can do. We should not see our ready acceptance of internet learning and artificial intelligence as the fine substitution for the human hand, or as mere correlation with accounts of isolation and ennui and loneliness. Our human work -- Aristotelean energeia -- is quickly escaping and becoming estranged from us. As a graduate student of UGA Classics writing a thesis on paideia, I am constantly thinking about education, both contemporary and ancient. This, then, necessarily involves musing over the ways we consciously and subconsciously absorb (or don't absorb) information, whether it comes from a text, a place of archaeological interest, the land, or the very habits of our livelihood. As the Teaching Assistant for the 2025 Croatia Maymester courses in archaeology and historic preservation, I was reminded once more how physical places play a large role in how we interact with the world, and thus how we are shaped by our experiences. This is especially true when you take a course that involves a homework assignment reading about ancient ruins and you get to touch the walls of that very ruin the next day, and when you take a course that asks you to think about how city planning accounts for water drainage with swales in the very city you are walking in. The lessons of the course are more real and live -- it reminds us that we cannot just understand everything through degrees of separation, whether through screens or through text. But when you are in a place so unfamiliar to how you are habituated to acting and thinking about the world, you are also challenged to think about who you are, your preconceived notions of cultural and social mores, and how you relate to others in a way that no text nor teacher can truly "teach", for the realisation is necessarily internal. There is no syllabus or tutor for such things. Even the student most staunchly averse to classroom learning can discover something about himself in the world of beings, and the most textually enthusiastic student can see their beloved texts come to life and realise something about themselves beyond the books -- how one sees the psychology behind architecture affect our movements, how one gut-responds to an unfamiliar European kiss-on-the-cheek hello, how one gains self-consciousness that they are a tourist in someone else's home. No Zoom lesson nor ChatGPT search can escape these changes in one's internality that is not teleologically bound. Over the weeks of the programme, I've seen these subtle shifts in thinking take place in some of the students. That is all a paedagogue can hope for -- that the seeds sown capture water, take root, and duly sprout. Type of News/Audience: Faculty and Staff Students
