As teachers and school leaders, it is hard to stay calm amid the fears AI has unleashed—overeducated adults without job prospects, the mass outsourcing of thinking and relationships, and even AI therapists. Schools are under intense pressure to quickly make children “AI-sturdy” and career-ready, often by prioritizing skill acquisition over purpose and human connection.
When parents talk with me about investing in a Browning School (NY) education, they are often seeking reassurance that it will lead to career success for their son a decade or two down the road. And since late 2022, they want that reassurance framed in AI terms—courses, credentials, and technical fluency. But what if the answer to life in an AI-saturated world is counterintuitive? What if the hard part of preparing students for the next phase of life is not teaching them how to partner with AI—which we do—but helping them hold onto their humanity? What if our best preparation for AI-readiness is the timeless human skill of storytelling?
Storytelling is the most human of human endeavors. It allows us to unsettle firmly held beliefs, to bring beauty to everyday interactions, to incite, to quiet, to question, and to be alive. It is the act of communicating emotion and meaning: the brush of fingertip to fingertip, the universal recognition of butterflies in a stomach, the volcanic rush of rage. At Browning, we choose to believe that humans matter, that our existence should be preserved. To do so, we must tell our stories.
GenAI can do many things well, and agentic AI may one day do almost everything well. But the one thing no model, bot, or machine can ever do is be you or me. AI mimics; humans are. It is the uncanniness of AI's mimicry that fuels fears about the blurring of reality and fantasy. Storytelling, with its emphasis on both the teller and the listener, quiets that fear. It reminds us that we are not powerless, that we remain uniquely ourselves, with purpose and agency. Our connection to one another—the stories we tell about who we are—is what creates meaning.
Our Storytelling Class
At Browning, we are doubling down on what it means to live a life of purpose by, beginning in September 2025, requiring a two-course sequence in storytelling as the bookends of students’ high school careers. As a boys’ school, we take the growing body of research on masculinity and the development of boys seriously. From Michael Reichert’s work on relational teaching to Richard Reeves’s ongoing analysis of where boys are thriving and where they are not, one finding is clear: Boys crave connection and the feeling of being needed. Additionally, we conduct our own action research—using student surveys, teacher observations, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis—which has revealed that boys show tremendous capacity for empathy and care when they are given both permission and responsibility to contribute meaningfully to others and to their community.
Storytelling is required for all ninth and 12th grade students as full-year, half-credit courses, paired with other signature Browning offerings such as constructive dialogue and research principles. In these courses, students learn both the art of public speaking and the craft of shaping a story. Just as importantly, they learn to do so in community, responding to one another, listening deeply, and developing the relational skills that storytelling demands.
The culminating experience for 12th grade students is an evening event in which each young man tells a story of personal significance before peers, families, and faculty. As students refine their stories in class and practice sharing them, there is always a magic moment when one boy is brave enough to be vulnerable, and in doing so, grants permission for others to do the same.
Whether recounting a missed chance with a long-held crush or reflecting on how a friend’s patience led to healing, students come to learn that in a world of constant change, who they are, what they experience, and how they share themselves are what ground them in self-worth. Through these storytelling experiences, they realize the importance of living in community, and, thus, become better able to identify the power in the story of another as well as be more vulnerable in sharing their own.
A Vehicle to Connect
We need students to understand that living well with GenAI requires living more fully with people, not mistaking one for the other. If discovering a sustaining sense of purpose is the ultimate goal of education, then storytelling is the vehicle that carries students there. They connect to meaning, something that ultimately supersedes any career they might pursue.
We teach our students how to use AI responsibly because avoiding or ignoring it would place them at a disadvantage in today’s world. But to prioritize AI proficiency over our distinctly human capacity for connection would be a mistake from which we could not recover. Career success will not be sustained solely by how effectively students can employ technology, but rather by how well they can draw upon what has sustained humans for millennia: the ability to tell—and receive—the stories that define our lives.