The CHOICE We Make: The Critically Human Skills That Define Our Future

By: Abel McClennen and Nate McClennen

This blog post is a high-level summary and call to action for a new white paper, The CHOICE We Make: The Critically Human Skills that Define our Future. We write this as a provocation in the face of accelerating change. Our hope is a shared movement for the moment. The language we choose is intentional and hopefully informs the hundreds of efforts underway to both define important skills and competencies and adapt to a world we cannot predict. 

We stand at a historic fork in the road, and the choice we make today will define our future. 

Artificial intelligence is an accelerating force that is fundamentally reshaping what it means to be human. As AI agents move from helpful assistants to co-workers and co-designers, they present a profound choice to all of us who care about learning.

One path leads to what we call the Passive Culture. It’s a world of cognitive ease, distraction, and dependence, where we gladly outsource our critical thinking and creativity to algorithms. If we follow this path, human agency slowly dissolves, leaving a society moderated and ultimately controlled by AI.

The other path is the Purpose Culture. This is a future where AI serves as a partner, amplifying the distinct qualities that make us human. It frees up our time to connect, to create, to empathize, and to solve complex challenges together. This is a world where human capabilities are augmented by deliberately cultivating the skills that allow us to lead, not follow, technology.

The market forces of convenience are already pushing us hard toward the Passive Culture. The great news is that the direction is not predetermined. Our pivot point—the most powerful lever we have—is the education of young people.

Why Education Systems Must Change Now

For too long, our schools have been built for the Industrial Age, driven by content delivery, compliance, and standardized assessments. But that world is gone.

The speed of AI’s advancement has simply outpaced our capacity to adapt. We are now preparing Generation Alpha to grow up with AI as their co-thinker, but our investment is dangerously unbalanced:

We have entered an age in which:

• AI Investment is exponentially larger than the investment in human skills necessary to co-exist with AI. This unbalanced approach pushes humanity further towards an imbalance, thus favoring a Passive Culture. 
• AI can “do” school. AI agents can complete entire academic workflows—assignments, reflections, research, and even assessments—without human involvement.
• AI shapes our worldviews. Algorithms shape what billions of people see, believe, and emotionally respond to before they form conscious opinions.
• AI is agnostic to truth. Communities, nations, and the world face new vulnerabilities as AI-generated misinformation floods information channels.
• Attention is declining. Human judgment, attention, and critical sense-making are under unprecedented external pressure.
• Human connection is being replaced. Youth are absorbing more content from AI-mediated platforms than from teachers, family members, or lived experience.

In other words, technology is evolving exponentially. Human skills are not—unless we choose to invest in them.

The CHOICE Framework: Reinvesting in Humanity

We must urgently redefine what it means to be educated. We must reorient our global education systems toward a set of Critically Human Skills required for a Purpose Culture.

This results in a clear set of outcomes Agency, Compassion, and Integrity. AI systems have no moral compass, cannot feel empathy, and are agnostic to truth. These three human outcomes are the core prerequisites for a healthy human-AI partnership.

The skills that drive this foundation are captured in the CHOICE Critically Human Skills. These six competencies remain essential, regardless of any parallel capabilities AI may develop.

• C – Critical Thinking: The ability to analyze, verify, and identify accuracy and bias in knowledge and information. Without it, we outsource verification and become susceptible to misinformation.
• H – Healthy Living: The habits and mindsets that sustain physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Wellness is the requirement for a purpose-driven life; only humans can develop resilience and long-term balance.
• O – Originality: The capacity to generate new ideas, perspectives, and creations. True invention comes from human experience and courage, not from an AI driven feedback loop of recombined knowledge. 
• I – Inquiry: The habit of curiosity, asking better questions, not just finding faster answers. Inquiry keeps science alive and learning joyful. We risk losing the impulse to wonder when AI provides instant answers.
• C – Connection: The ability to build meaningful human relationships and work collaboratively. Human progress is collective. We need deep social bonds (empathy, collaboration) for belonging and meaning.
• E – Emotional Intelligence: The ability to understand and manage emotions—both one’s own and others’. This is essential for ethical judgment, leadership, and conflict resolution, and it cannot be outsourced.

A Co-Intelligent Vision for Learning

The goal is not human versus AI, but Human + AI. Co-intelligence becomes possible only when our human capacities are strong enough to remain in the lead.

AI gives us unprecedented power and capability—but the Critically Human Skills give us the Agency, Compassion, and Integrity to move us toward a Purpose Culture.

The defining question of our age is not: What will AI become?

But rather: Who will WE become?

Mr. Abel McClennen, as he is known by fellow community members, co-founded La Paz Community School in Guanacaste, Costa Rica in 2007 . An active leader in the local community, he constantly strives for there to be open communication between constituents who represent different ideologies in order to achieve thoughtful and sustainable growth that empowers local communities to build their own social capital. A graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine where he majored in Physics and minored in Sociology, Abel’s teaching career began in the year 2000 at Souhegan High School. Mr. Abel’s long term vision is to embed the Core principles from the La Paz program into public and private education so that critical thinking, empathy, collaboration, and conflict resolution are the norm, not the exception in classrooms around the world.