If you haven’t recently watched Disney’s WALL-E, it is worth revisiting. The film presents a vision of humanity in surrender. Chased from earth by environmental collapse, humans in the movie are living in collective isolation on an automated cruise ship in space. Plugged into their devices and disconnected from the world, the passengers have ceded thought and decision-making to the intelligent robots with which they have surrounded themselves. This may sound like a description of a present day school lunch room, but in 2008 when WALL-E was released, the most popular cell phone was a Motorola RAZR and an artificially intelligent computer that could communicate in plain language was the stuff of, well, movies.
From one perspective, the imagined humans in WALL-E had ceded their humanity when they ceded their agency. From another, there is nothing more human than to invent new tools and more efficient means of doing work so that we can instead fill our time with the things we want to do. For innovation to serve us rather than control us, we must be clear in our purpose and retain those parts of learning, leadership, and humanity that are too important to surrender.
This balance is not a new struggle for educators. In his recent article Choosing to Stay Human, Ethan Mollick explores the tension between the productive struggle that drives learning and what researchers at the Wharton Center term “cognitive surrender.” The piece concludes with a challenge: defining what matters.
“A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes…[But] AI is different because the technology is general enough that virtually any cognitive task can be offloaded into it to some degree. [The problem is] we mostly don’t know yet, for any specific task, what is important [for a person to do] and what is not. Deciding that is going to be a real challenge.”
In public policy terms, this debate is playing itself out in Lansing as lawmakers struggle to balance competing demands for their limited attention. Proposals for increased local control and flexibility vie with bills to ban cell phones during instructional time and mandate phonics instruction. Initiatives to reshape school funding compete with efforts to redefine what it means to be a high school graduate. These are not contradictory proposals, but without a clear focus on which human experiences and learning processes should remain central, we risk losing the signal in the noise.
As Mollick suggests, this moment demands vision and leadership to guide policymakers.
Engaging MASSP Members In Leading Forward
Principals have embraced a focus on innovation in education. Through efforts like MASSP’s Innovative Leaders Network, our members have defined innovation not simply as adopting new tools and technologies, but about rethinking our delivery model to personalize and adapt education to meet the current and future needs of students. That doesn’t just mean AI. It can also include flexible scheduling, competency-based learning, project-based learning, or something else entirely.
But form must follow function. Innovation must be based on how best to deliver the skills and knowledge students need. They are two sides of the same coin.
At EdCon 2026 region meetings, later this month, MASSP members are going to engage in a conversation around this tension (for those not able to attend EdCon we will also be collecting input via a digital survey). Your input will not only shape MASSP’s advocacy, but will also help identify potential areas of focus for the upcoming year’s region meetings so we can support each other in this challenge.
Your thoughtful participation in this discussion is crucial. If MASSP and our members do not lead in this space, others will. While those groups may be well-meaning, the work of operationalizing policies like graduation requirements and innovative learning structures is the work of building leaders.
WALL-E is an extreme example, but we need not look further than our current pupil accounting system to see what happens when we begin to serve our tools rather than having them serve us.
So what matters? Knowing students will graduate into a world we cannot fully predict, how do we ensure the policy and funding environment center on what is important and facilitate innovation and adaptation as learning needs evolve? How can we know whether or not that is happening?
Principals lead learning. Leadership demands a vision for what matters. Creating that vision is the definition of productive struggle.