By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
In the age of AI, effort has become optional. As students, we no longer need to flip through textbooks or reread chapters. As one homework app asks, “Why scroll through 100 pages when AI can summarize the most important things in 10?” Across classrooms and countries, education is being reshaped by the insistent buzz of generative AI models. But AI didn’t just appear in the classroom; it was invited in by institutions eager to modernize, optimize, and compete.
For instance, the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (IAIED), founded in 1997 and now including members from 40 countries, has long positioned itself “at the frontiers of the fields of computer science, education, and psychology.” Through organizing major research conferences, publishing a leading journal, and showcasing diverse AI applications, IAIED is critical to the discourse and development of AI in education. It also reflects a broader trend: between 2025 and 2030, the AI industry is expected to grow from $6 billion to over $32 billion USD. 83% of higher education professionals from a diverse range of institutions believe “generative AI will profoundly change higher education in the next three to five years.” Silicon Valley giants aren’t just innovating these tools. They are also lobbying for their integration into the school system. This is a transformation backed by capital, coded by corporations, and endorsed by institutions desperate to keep up.
And it’s working. A McKinsey survey found that 94% of employees and 99% of C-suite leaders are familiar with Gen AI tools, while 47% of employees expect to use AI for nearly one-third of their daily tasks. And universities are listening. Offering courses for students to become prompt engineers and AI ethicists, institutions are preparing them for jobs that didn’t exist five years ago but now reflect the priorities of an efficiency obsessed corporate world. But who does this transformation benefit, and at what cost?
This isn’t just a pedagogical, labour, or environmental issue, as important as those are. It is something more fundamental to human nature: the erosion of curiosity and critical thinking. As dopamine-fuelled thumbs dance to infinite scrolls, we lose the quiet patience needed to parse meaning from a paragraph. The problem isn’t AI’s capabilities but our willingness to let corporations dictate the goals of education — and life. When our only objective is maximum productivity and minimal resistance, we strip learning of friction, and therefore, its meaning. After all, if anyone can “generate” a paper, what is the point of writing one?
In this reality increasingly enmeshed with technologies, we’ve come to expect answers — and dopamine — to be delivered to us immediately. Students begin to internalize that if something isn’t fast, it isn’t worth doing. However, education should be a practice to cultivate, not a credential to purchase.
As a recent study found, the more confident people are in AI’s abilities, the less they rely on their own critical thinking. Similarly, a study on “cognitive offloading” showed that frequent use of AI correlated with weaker problem-solving skills. This suggests that as people grow more accustomed to immediate answers, they lose the memory of mental struggle. Younger students are especially vulnerable, growing up in an environment where boredom is pathologized, curiosity is optional, and learning is gamified. What we are learning is not how to think but how to shortcut.
“For all the content and knowledge at our fingertips, we are lacking the time to sit alone, to ask good questions, to chase rabbits down holes without knowing where they will lead.”
Even before ChatGPT, researchers warned that students fail to benefit from homework when answers are readily available online. Now, when entire assignments can be completed without thought, Stanford professor Rob Reich asks whether what is at risk is AI displacing the very act of thinking. Writing, after all, is not just a means to communicate but also a way of creating knowledge. The very act of wrestling with an idea, sitting with uncertainty, failing, rephrasing, and trying again, is what shapes the intellect.
And yet, the platforms profiting from this are preaching empowerment. They claim to democratize access, support learning, and save time. But time saved from what exactly? From the very moments that develop intellectual resilience? We have mastered the art of never being bored, and in the process, forgotten how to wonder.
This comes with a heavy psychological toll. As Stanford assistant professor Chris Piech shared, a student broke down in his office, convinced that years of learning to code were now obsolete. The anxiety isn’t about incompetence, it is about irrelevance. When we are told our skills are rendered useless, we don’t just lose confidence, we lose a sense of purpose. Because, what is learning worth in a world of infinite answers?
We’re told to be productive, efficient, optimized. As if the real value in being human comes from what we can produce and how fast we can do it. But the best ideas often come from wandering, from play, from slowness. Real understanding takes time. Sometimes, it takes failing. Sometimes, it takes boredom.
We are drowning in data but are starved for connection. For all the content and knowledge at our fingertips, we are lacking the time to sit alone, to ask good questions, to chase rabbits down holes without knowing where they will lead. In this environment, perhaps the most radical thinking we can learn to do is to slow down. To reimagine education not as a product to be consumed, but as a process of becoming. Perhaps it is time for fewer lectures and more labs, fewer tests and more conversations. Perhaps it is time to value peer collaboration, iterative writing, reflection, and the kinds of assessments that ask students to apply knowledge in solving tasks.
The antidote to the crisis of AI in education is to remember that education is not a product; it is a process. Models like the Four P’s of Creative Learning (Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play) offer a blueprint. Instead of treating students as users or consumers, we must see them as co-creators of meaning. How might our relationship with learning change if we were encouraged to fail better, not just succeed faster? The goal shifts from producing measurable outcomes to cultivating a deep curiosity and adaptive thinking.
Learning shouldn’t be about acquiring answers. It should be about learning to ask better questions. ChatGPT can help you answer questions, but it cannot teach you how to understand or apply that in the real world. In the face of Big Tech, reclaiming learning as joyful, frustrating, and meaningful is a radical act of resistance. To learn to learn and love it. To recover our passion, we must unlearn the narratives sold to us by billion-dollar companies and build new ones rooted in slowness, struggle, and the sacredness of thought.
