Every morning my inbox fills with new AI products: personalised learning, workload solutions, assessment silver bullets.
These offers carry not only a financial cost but a quieter, more insidious one too.
When I began teaching, this kind of technology felt like salvation.
I remember trawling the internet for someone who had once taught Eliot’s objective correlative and could help me make sense of it. The idea that one day a system might do that work for me felt like liberation.
Now that it can, I find myself wondering what is being liberated, and from whom.
These days I am more circumspect, more suspicious of what is coming down the track. AI tools can certainly streamline admin and free up time, but I worry they may begin to crowd out the messy, unpredictable moments that make education profoundly human.
There is something thrilling about teaching a class and knowing that someone in that room might one day know more about the subject than you do. That possibility, that passing of understanding from one mind to another, is the essence of teaching.
Education was never meant to be efficient
Education was never meant to be efficient. It is slow, relational work. It grows through conversation, trust and the gradual shaping of minds over time, through the small acts of noticing, attending, questioning and, above all, thinking.
The classroom remains one of the few physical places where people still think together in real time about things that matter.
I do not want my own children educated in a system that offers them a screen instead of a teacher, or a bot instead of a brain.
More than this, I want them taught by teachers who think and care deeply about their subject, not by those who outsource or offload thinking elsewhere.
I keep coming back to Harold Bloom’s claim that Shakespeare “invented the human”.
He meant that Shakespeare’s characters, for the first time in literature, began to think about their own thoughts, that they became aware of themselves. I think that is what real learning does: it helps young people overhear their own minds.
AI is a technology of replication
AI, by contrast, is a technology of replication, animated by ghosts of human thought.
As Kyle Chayka wrote recently in The New Yorker, it is a ‘technology of averages’. It produces smooth competence but little originality. People who rely on it begin to write and think in increasingly similar ways.
But if our students come to believe that knowledge no longer needs to be learned, that it can always be summoned, then something fundamental is lost.
If AI convinces them that knowing is unnecessary, that the answer is always waiting just beyond the cursor, then the purpose of school itself begins to dissolve.
When knowledge feels instantly available and endlessly reproducible, the struggle to understand begins to seem redundant, even though it is what forms intellect and character alike. We will have to work harder than ever to show why knowing still matters.
The arts matter more than ever
The human encounter through which knowledge comes alive is not a means to an end, but the end itself. It is within that dialogue, not in the answer, that students discover why learning is worth doing at all.
And here, the arts matter more than ever. I don’t mind if a machine drives my car or stocks my fridge before I realise what I’m missing.
But I would care if it wrote the novel in my hand, composed my favourite song, or told my child what beauty or love means. The arts remind us that meaning cannot be automated. They depend on interpretation, perspective and emotion. They depend on our humanity.
Perhaps this is the moment to remember that the arts are not an extra, but an origin. In a world increasingly built on pattern and prediction, they stand for what cannot be computed: imagination, empathy and judgement.
They remind us that to be human is not simply to process information, but to invent meaning through it.
Bloom said that Shakespeare invented the human. The danger is that, in our haste to embrace AI, we begin to diminish ourselves.
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