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Reflections On My Third-Annual Study Leave

By Michael Ulku-Steiner, Head of School.

6-minute read

From March 2–22 (including Durham Academy’s Spring Break), I was on study leave. Click to read more about the rationale for this annual retreat, my reflections after the first iteration in 2024, and a recap of my 2025 experience.

This year, I spent one week hiking in California and two at home — in forests (walking alone, with audiobooks and/or with friends) and libraries (reading, with and without, particular aims and making my first attempts at vibe coding). Below: some reflections on two questions perplexing me and many educators these days.

My wife and I were walking on a high cliff in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, focusing mostly on our feet and the rocky Carmel-by-the-Sea trail. We squinted intermittently through the fog. The wind ripped through the trees. The Pacific roared below.

The week before that hike, I was catching up with DA alumni in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Oakland and Berkeley — comforted by their old stories of enduring friendships and life-changing teachers and inspired by their new stories of the techno-optimistic adventures that pull so many talented builders (including a lot of DA grads) to the Bay Area.

The day before that hike, I’d read about Dr. Yasuo Higurashi, a Japanese physiologist who solved an ancient riddle: How do cats always fall on their feet? Higurashi found that the feline spine is extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae.

The night before that hike, I’d read a line from John Green that echoed in my mind as I walked at Point Lobos — and kept thinking about the dizzying pace of technological change contrasted with the timeless fog and cypress and sea: “When you're living in the middle of history,” Green writes in his 2021 essay collection The Anthropocene Reviewed, “you never know what it means.”

In California, the burning questions of my study leave became clear:

1. How should Durham Academy best prepare for a future that is at once opaque, exciting, terrifying, empowering, disorienting and already upon us?
2. How can we preserve, expand and deepen the human connections and humane skills that will matter even more as machines handle routine tasks and our students squint into the fog to find their purpose and their path?

Unsurprisingly, I was not able to answer those questions in three weeks. Nor has humanity done much better in the three-and-a-half years since ChatGPT was released to the public. As author Kevin Kelly puts it, "We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them."

But through the fog, some ancient and essential mountains come into view:

Care: Our central responsibilities as parents and educators: to protect children from danger and ignorance and to prepare them for their lives. If, as Steve Jobs said in 1980, “a computer is a bicycle for the mind,” then AI is a motorcycle that might soon fly.

The joy, adrenaline, possibilities and risks all correspond. Most of our older students are already riding these motorcycles every day. We must offer them some driver’s ed. We have to give them helmets. In News & Notes articles about our Generative AI Framework for Faculty and Staff and the ways our students are helping us refine our classroom practices or in our most recent State of the School presentation, we’ve shared some of the steps we’re taking to engage AI with both curiosity and caution.

Truth, Beauty and Goodness: Speed, scale and efficiency do not help children build lives of meaning and purpose. Young people have always needed adult guides to light the way through the muck and mire of childhood and adolescence with inspiring stories, elegant mathematical concepts, sublime works of art and trusting human relationships. Durham Academy will fervently protect our nearly century-long commitment to a broad liberal arts curriculum.

Even for those most worried about the economic dimensions of their children’s lives, broad learning in the liberal tradition is the most agile and long-term-effective way to prepare for excellence in the future. As Evan Armstrong wrote in March in his Substack newsletter The Leverage: “The models are replacing commodity work, but they're failing spectacularly at taste, judgment, and long-term thinking — which means the premium on those human skills has never been higher. The people who sharpen those edges right now are going to have the best decade of their careers.”

Struggle: How, exactly, do students “sharpen those edges?” They need tasks hard enough to require genuine effort, but not so hard that they lead to paralysis or despair. Young learners need to build not just knowledge, but also the capacity to tolerate difficulty, think flexibly, solve problems and earn genuine confidence. As Associate Head of School Kristen Klein told our Upper Schoolers in a recent assembly about AI, when we remove productive struggle from learning, we produce short-term comfort but long-term fragility.

Humanity: Preparing for an AI future isn't about becoming more technological; it's about becoming more human. This is why the texture of daily life at DA — the quality of our conversations, the health of our students, the depth of our relationships — matters as much as any curricular decision. Less rote knowledge transmission will mean solving more real-world problems with real neighbors. Less passive consumption will bring more creative collaboration. “When the machine can do the machine work,” writes Brent Beshore, a private equity firm founder and CEO, “we have fewer excuses to keep asking humans to live like machines — especially ourselves.”

 

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Where do we ask DA students to live like machines? How can we reduce rote learning and expand real-life problem-solving and human relationships? As technological, economic and political realities spin faster every day, how can we center our students in health (both mental and physical), friendship and service to others? How can we leverage AI (the time it might save, the personalization it might yield, the opportunities it might open) to teach the virtues that will matter most for our students’ lives: curiosity, courage, resilience, drive, creativity and generosity?

This is not a pivot; it’s a recommitment. All the traits in the paragraph above appear in our Portrait of a DA Graduate. Our mission, adopted by DA’s board in 1970 (just before Intel released its first microprocessor and just after ARPANET made its first node-to-node connection), is more relevant than ever. The more disorienting the technological change, the more essential our humane North Star becomes.

In the list below, I recommend some of the most poignant articles, books and podcasts from my time away. To better understand the threads that link our recent academic reforms (particularly competency-based learning in the Middle School and our ADV curriculum in the Upper School), check out the pieces with Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop. Their work nicely captures why we are working so hard to make learning at DA more self-driven, deep and durable. It also explains why we are helping students shift their mindsets: from jumping through more hoops to choosing the hoops that matter and then leaping over them with passion. “Life is wasted on the lukewarm,” writes author, essayist and poet Maria Popova. “Anything you give your time and attention to should roil with the magma of yes.”

This year’s study leave felt like my choose-your-own learning adventure. Whether walking on the Pacific Coast, eating lunch on a weekday with my wife (a revelation!) or reading at a desk in the Durham Public Library, I often felt the magma of yes. As I returned to campus on March 23, I felt glad and grateful to be back — doing work that matters with people I love.

As the power and perils of AI continue to emerge from the fog, I find myself returning to Dr. Higurashi's cats: flexible where flexibility is needed, sturdy where sturdiness matters, and always, somehow, landing on their feet. That is what we are asking of this community: to hold our mission tightly at the center while bending nimbly toward an unscripted future. To keep our humanity at the core of our work. To follow Robert Frost's counsel (“The best way out is always through.”) and John Green's addition: (“The only good way through is together.”). To show young people vividly, sincerely and relentlessly that the world is beautiful, mysterious, exciting and full of amazing people and opportunities.

As diplomat Christiana Figueres reminds us, “hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” At DA, we intend to keep working.