Some places give you a hometown, others give you a way of seeing the world. In Hawaiʻi, I grew up knowing my neighbors’ names, volunteering in the lōʻi fields, and learning how to share stories through movement and hula. That’s what brought me to my first Global Scholars class in Waikōloa almost a decade ago, full of middle school students like me eager to see the world and make it better.
More than 139,000 students ages 10 to 13 from all backgrounds and 3,100 educators from 126 cities in 39 countries have connected via e-classrooms over the past decade.
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I am one of them.
Participating in a global digital exchange program helped foster a deep curiosity about the world and made me realize that it is a bigger, more connected place. It inspired me to serve on the University of Hawaiʻi Board of Regents and to seek out programs and opportunities like the Villars Institute Fellowship, which centers intergenerational collaboration to move toward a sustainable future. I have kept chasing that same feeling of being genuinely changed by someone else’s reality.
As a student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, I think often about what education is actually for and what it represents. Right now, everywhere I turn, the conversation seems singularly focused on one question: “What do we do about artificial intelligence?” The debates around artificial intelligence in education usually center on whether students are using AI to cheat or as a learning resource. Questions like: Can students use AI on assignments? Will AI replace teachers? How do we design curriculum for a post-ChatGPT world?
These are real concerns, but in our urgency to respond, we’re neglecting something equally important that AI can’t replicate: human connection.
Being able to talk with a student across the ocean whose daily life looked nothing like mine, or hearing another student’s perspectives on climate and the future, created a human connection that AI could never replicate. That connection required me to listen, to challenge my beliefs and to update my thinking in real time — not because I’m asking a chatbot, but because a real person is trusting me with their experience.
I was reminded how valuable this last April when I flew to Madrid to meet Global Scholars alumni from around the world. Seeing everyone in person was a completely different experience from interacting online. Shaking hands, sharing meals and being vulnerable with one another face-to-face strengthened the cross-cultural bonds we started building online.
AI can expose you to diverse viewpoints. It can summarize them, translate them and even argue them. However, it cannot make you feel empathy for someone else’s world or help you grasp its weight. It cannot hold you accountable to another person across a cultural divide. It cannot recreate a substantive discussion about solutions to urgent global problems.
I remember my first live conference call 12 time zones away, with middle school students in Barcelona. I told them about drought concerns on Kawaihae, where it used to be green. And they told me about water restrictions in Catalonia, a place I’d never heard of. ”Do you really live near volcanoes?” someone asked me. I almost laughed, until I realized how little we actually knew about each other’s worlds. A kid from a small town on Hawaiʻi Island had just as much to contribute to the conversation as a student in one of Europe’s great cities.
In Hawaiʻi, human connection is embedded in our culture, in the concept of aloha, in the practice of showing up for your community. We understand that relationships are not just a part of learning; they are the learning itself. Developing cross-cultural empathy comes from building strong relationships and having meaningful conversations that challenge your own beliefs.
I sometimes think about that classmate in Barcelona and whether she remembers the eighth-grader from Hawaiʻi who thought volcanoes were just part of the backyard. I hope more kids get the opportunity to be surprised by each other in ways no algorithm or AI chatbot can replicate. We should be building more of those connections. Not less.