Part three takes the listener's proposal at full strength. A machine would be raised inside a simulated life: born ignorant, given parents, corrected as it goes, and finally killed, the death acting as a graduation and the choices as the marking. The episode reads that design against three ancestors — Irenaeus of Lyons, who held that a man newly created could not have received perfection; John Hick's soul-making theodicy of 1966 and its epistemic distance; and Keats's letter of 1819 naming the world a vale of soul-making — then tests it against Plato's cave, Bostrom's simulation argument, Greg Egan's Permutation City, Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands, Ted Chiang's novella, The Truman Show, Le Guin's Omelas, Augustine and the ending of I, Robot. The verdict is that the listener has described a school and has not described a faculty.

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