Chuncheon turns to St. John's College Great Books seminars to counter AI

Chuncheon, a city in South Korea, is using an old-fashioned answer to a new worry: students leaning on artificial intelligence instead of thinking for themselves. In a report published on Monday, 9 November 2026, US public broadcaster NPR described how the city government set up an academic partnership with St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, to bring the college's "Great Books" teaching model into local schools and universities. In this model, students read original texts, from Aristotle, Euclid and Shakespeare to Korean writers such as Nobel laureate Han Kang, and teachers do not lecture; they only guide the discussion.

South Korea has moved quickly to bring AI tools into education, NPR reported, at a time when international tests show its students' reading skills slipping. That combination has raised a concern familiar to students and teachers everywhere, including in India: if a chatbot can summarise a chapter or draft an essay in seconds, when do students learn to read closely, argue and form their own views?

Chuncheon's answer is to make students do exactly what a machine cannot do for them in the moment: read a difficult original text, sit around a table and defend an interpretation in front of others. St. John's College in the US builds its teaching around primary texts and seminars rather than lectures. By partnering with the college, the city is trying to import both the method and the training that teachers need to run such discussions.

The scale is still small. The figures quoted by NPR, about 120 college students and 770 younger students, are tiny next to South Korea's school population. But the idea has spread from one university programme in 2019 to a city-backed plan, a school that has adopted the model and seminars at a local high school, according to the college.

For Indian students, the story is a useful mirror. Students and teachers in India face the same question about AI tools and homework. Chuncheon's experiment shows one concrete way a city, not just a single elite school, can try to put that into practice: invest in teacher training and change how a class is run, rather than only banning tools.

Peepals calculation: Of the roughly 890 students in South Korea's Great Books programmes (120 college students plus about 770 younger students), about 87% are school-age learners (770 ÷ 890 ≈ 0.87). There are about 22 students for every teacher now in training (890 ÷ 40 ≈ 22). Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: Chuncheon schools working with the partnership are running seminars and teacher training in the Great Books method, and the NPR report has drawn international attention to the experiment.

Long-term: If the approach improves reading and reasoning, other Korean cities, and education systems elsewhere worried about AI, may look at discussion-based teaching as a complement to technology rather than a rejection of it.

Who is affected: Students and teachers in Chuncheon and in South Korea's Great Books programmes, education officials weighing how to respond to AI in classrooms, and students worldwide who use AI tools for their studies.

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