Paul Blaskcho

In this episode, Priten speaks with Paul Blaschko, an assistant teaching professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. Paul's work sits at the intersection of liberal education, critical thinking instruction, and course design. The central question driving their conversation: in an era of AI that can generate plausible-sounding arguments and explanations, can we still teach students to think critically—or must we fundamentally reimagine what critical thinking means?Key Takeaways:EdTech should solve existing problems, not create new ones. Paul approaches technology as a tool only when he's already facing a pedagogical challenge. This shifts the question from "what can this tool do?" to "what does my classroom need?"YouTube explainers preceded ChatGPT in reshaping how students research and learn. Long before AI, students were outsourcing understanding to video tutorials rather than wrestling with dense texts, revealing a deeper shift in how students approach knowledge.Critical thinking instruction requires direct practice with real arguments, not shortcuts around difficulty. There's no substitute for students actually constructing and defending their own positions through dialogue and written work, even when AI can do it faster.Scaling critical thinking instruction demands new infrastructure, not just new pedagogy. Paul and his team are testing whether platforms like Think Arguments can help instructors manage the feedback and iteration needed to teach reasoning at scale across institutions.AI may not replace the professor's role so much as expand it into explicit curation and judgment. In a world where explanations are abundant, the teacher's value shifts toward deciding which frameworks matter and helping students evaluate competing arguments.Paul Blaschko is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches God and the Good Life, a course dedicated to asking the big questions about meaning, morality, and faith. He also serves as the Director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society, a program devoted to exploring how the humanities can help us find meaning in work. With Meghan Sullivan, he has co-authored The Good Life Method (Penguin Press, 2022), a book about how philosophy can help us live better lives. He is currently working on a book on the philosophy of work (under contract with Princeton University Press), and is the co-founder of a Notre Dame based tech start-up that aims to solve problems with dialogue on the internet.