In recent years, educational institutions across the globe have started to compete with one another in integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their ecosystems. This race toward technological modernisation is often justified by the promise of increased productivity, efficiency, and personalisation in learning. Indeed, there is growing evidence suggesting that the integration of AI tools has yielded positive results in terms of enhanced grading systems, intelligent tutoring, adaptive assessments, and data-driven administrative decision-making. However, amid this wave of enthusiasm, the darker side of this integration rarely finds open discussion.
While research abounds in glorifying the success stories of AI applications in classrooms, not many have meaningfully examined the negative consequences. When we outsource our thinking to algorithms, we risk diminishing our own capacity for reasoning, reflection, and questioning. Thinking, after all, is not a mechanical act — it is a deeply human process that involves uncertainty, struggle, and discovery. Yet, AI tools, designed to provide quick and polished answers, tend to short-circuit this intellectual process.
As we grow accustomed to the convenience of machine-generated outputs, we often begin to lose our own sense of agency. What began as assistance soon turns into intellectual subservience. The sense of accomplishment that comes from creating, interpreting, or solving diminishes. Over time, this can instil a subtle sense of inferiority, as we start believing that machines are better than us at almost everything — writing, analysing, predicting, and even thinking. We begin to see ourselves not as creators but as subjects of an automated system. What follows is self-doubt, disengagement, and a loss of confidence in one’s intellectual abilities.
Another alarming shift is the commodification of knowledge. Answers, once the outcome of critical thought and discussion, are now treated as readily available ‘products’. Educational training increasingly revolves around crafting the “right prompts” to elicit the “best answers” from AI tools. Students are being trained not to think deeply, but to command effectively. The act of questioning, which once symbolised intellectual curiosity and academic freedom, is reduced to a mechanical exercise in prompt engineering.
Even teacher training programs have not escaped this trend. Institutions are conducting workshops to “empower” educators in handling AI tools. However, most of these sessions remain focused on the ‘mechanics’ — the range of available AI platforms and the linguistic precision required for generating effective prompts. What remains largely unaddressed is the philosophical, ethical, and pedagogical dimension of AI use in education. Such an approach risks stripping educators of their moral and creative agency, reducing them to operators of pre-programmed systems rather than facilitators of human understanding.
At the macro level, corporations and technology companies promoting AI often appear to be driven less by educational need and more by economic competition. Their justification is simple yet revealing: if we do not move forward, others will, and they will capture the market. This relentless competition fuels a profit-oriented race that often disregards social realities, cultural contexts, and ethical considerations. Education which is traditionally viewed as a space for nurturing empathy, compassion, and human values, is increasingly being shaped by market logic.
While it would be naïve to reject AI altogether — given its undeniable benefits in data management, accessibility, and personalised learning — it is equally dangerous to embrace it uncritically. The challenge lies not in whether to use AI but how to use it responsibly. We must ensure that humans — students, teachers, and policymakers — remain at the centre of the decision-making process.
The missing elements in AI-enabled systems are empathy, compassion, consciousness, and moral concern — all of which are intrinsic to human judgment. AI may simulate understanding, but it cannot feel. It may optimise performance, but it cannot care. Education is not merely about information transfer; it is about forming minds, building character, and nurturing moral responsibility and these qualities cannot be automated.
Therefore, it is imperative to develop a robust ethical framework that governs the use of AI in education. Such a framework should address issues of bias, agency, dependency, data privacy, and the preservation of human creativity. Until such an ethical foundation is firmly established, the current rush to adopt AI in education makes one wonder — are we truly advancing, or are we being quietly hijacked?
prof.thameem@gmail.com
Published – November 30, 2025 03:04 am IST
