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There’s an old Latin phrase that has stayed with me lately: Succisa virescit. The translation roughly means, “When cut down, we grow back stronger.” Originally the sixth-century motto of the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, it reflects a simple but profound truth about the human condition—growth often begins in the aftermath of loss. What was once a call to spiritual and physical resilience has become, for me, a powerful metaphor for cognition itself, particularly in an age when artificial intelligence and large language models promise the curious dynamic of fluency without failure.
And today, it’s the motto of one of the leading schools in the United States, The Delbarton School. And it got me thinking: Why does a dusty Latin phrase from a sixth-century monastery still feel so urgent and relevant in an age of AI? My sense is that it speaks to something that technology, for all its brilliance, still doesn’t understand. And that’s the necessity of struggle.
The Cut as Catalyst
In education, we’ve always known that growth doesn’t just happen in the moments of clarity; it happens in the moments of confusion. It’s the student wrestling with a difficult concept, the scientist facing failed experiments, the writer staring at a blank page. These are the “cuts” from which we grow back stronger. Friction, frustration, and failure aren’t obstacles to learning; they are learning itself.
Every teacher recognizes the paradox. We want to protect students from discouragement, yet the very moments that hurt the most are the ones that build cognitive endurance. Neuroscience paints an interesting perspective. Struggle triggers the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and acetylcholine. These are the chemicals that signal the brain to pay attention and form stronger neural connections. Simply put, the mind literally rewires itself in response to difficulty. And when you remove the challenge, the rewiring never happens.
The Shortcut Mind
In earlier posts, I’ve explored how artificial intelligence, especially large language models, invites us into a world of shortcuts. In AI and the Shortcut That’s Rewriting Human Thought, I wrote about how the pursuit of efficiency can quietly (and perhaps insidiously) erode our tolerance for the cognitive struggle that can drive deep learning. The algorithm swiftly completes our sentences and anticipates our needs. It offers a frictionless surface where thinking once required traction.
But when thought becomes too smooth, it loses its capacity to surprise itself. In Where the Mind Stumbles, It Grows, I argued that the mind strengthens itself through difficulty and that the stumble, not the success, is what deepens understanding. Succisa virescit captures that dynamic perfectly. The mind must be “cut down” to grow back wiser.
When AI Removes the Cut
AI, by design, eliminates the cognitive cuts. It doesn’t doubt and recover. It anticipates and completes, and in that digital process, it spares us the unease of uncertainty. But in doing so, it also spares us the chance to cultivate perseverance. When every question finds an answer instantly, and every draft resolves cleanly, we lose something essential—the emotional and intellectual scar tissue that transforms experience into insight.
Technology’s gift, if we dare call it a gift, is speed and scale. Yet its danger is smoothness. When we let machines do the stumbling for us, we risk creating a generation of thinkers fluent in answers but fragile in process. And at the heart of this is that education, stripped of friction, becomes performance rather than formation.
The human mind isn’t just designed for completion but for correction. Our errors are the “cognitive crucibles” where understanding takes shape.
Reclaiming the Struggle
So how do we respond? By reclaiming the value of resistance in learning, perhaps analogous to resistance training in athletics. We can use AI as a mirror, not a crutch—as a tool that provokes rather than pacifies. Imagine prompting for counterarguments and not just the easy answers. Perhaps we should be using LLMs not just to finish a thought but to complicate it. And here’s the key point. The goal isn’t to banish the machine but to reintroduce friction into the exchange.
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We all, from student to teacher, can all treat AI as a kind of cognitive sparring partner—a system that can generate cognitive velocity, but not vitality. That’s our job. And the responsibility falls on us to slow down where the algorithm speeds up and to linger in the gray spaces it would rush us past.
Growing Back Stronger
Succisa virescit is more than a motto; it’s a philosophy of mind. It reminds us that strength isn’t born from perfection, but from repair. In an age that prizes efficiency, it asks a radical yet fundamental question: What if the struggle is the point? What if the stumble, the setback, and the slow rebuild are not interruptions to learning, but its essence?
AI may help us think faster, but only humans can grow back stronger. The algorithm may complete the sentence, but it’s still up to us to live the story.
