We increasingly hear that technology is “destroying” education. Recent discussions among economists, educators, and policymakers point to a serious concern: artificial intelligence is impacting education faster and more radically than it is reshaping industry or labor markets.

Traditional educational mechanisms – exams, tests, assignments, homework are losing their reliability. When students can successfully complete assessments using AI tools, it reveals an uncomfortable truth: in many cases, we were not evaluating understanding or thinking, but the ability to reproduce patterns. When such students are later placed in environments that require independent reasoning, a troubling gap often appears. They function as transmitters of answers rather than subjects of thought. [1]

This concern is understandable. And largely justified.

At the same time, it opens the door to a broader and more systemic question.

Students do not live in classrooms forever. They eventually enter a world where technology is not a violation of the rules, but the default condition. AI, automation, and digital assistants will be embedded in professional life. Attempting to temporarily “clean” education of technology risks creating an artificial greenhouse, a protected environment that collapses the moment graduates leave it. The same dynamics will return, often faster and more painfully.

This reframes the problem.

The core issue is not artificial intelligence itself. The issue is an educational model that continues to assess what can already be automated.

When exams reward information reproduction, AI inevitably outperforms humans. In such cases, it is not education that is being nullified, but its industrial-era form – a form designed for a stable world with scarce access to knowledge.

What we are facing is not a crisis of students. It is a crisis of educational architecture.

Much attention is rightly given to the qualities human thinking must develop in this new reality: intuition, empathy, imagination, critical judgment. This is an important and accurate focus. Yet it naturally leads to a deeper systemic question: even if we clearly understand what qualities need to be developed, is the existing architecture of education capable of developing them in practice?

Modern education is built around disciplines, contact hours, reporting requirements, formal assessments, and diplomas. It was designed to train specialists for a relatively predictable world. It is optimized for standardization and reproduction. It was not designed as an environment for cultivating cognitive autonomy in a digital world overloaded with information and externalized thinking tools.

If students degrade when using AI, this is not because AI exists. It is because educational systems have long rewarded external compliance over internal cognitive work. They taught how to fit formats, not how to maintain intellectual agency. In such a structure, any technology that reduces effort will inevitably lead to simplification.

The technological environment is irreversible. This means the solution lies not in tightening control, but in changing the underlying logic of the system:

  • education can no longer function as an isolated space;
  • assessment must move beyond memory checks;
  • the diploma should no longer be treated as the endpoint of development.

The exam of the future is not a ban on AI. It is the ability to explain how and why it was used, where its limits were identified, and where independent decisions were made. What should be evaluated is not the answer, but the ability to hold logic, position, and responsibility.

Yet even this is not sufficient. If the structure remains unchanged, new formats will eventually be absorbed into the old logic of formalization and imitation. This points to a deeper transformation: a redefinition of the teacher’s role, a revision of curricula, a shift from knowledge transmission to working with uncertainty, and the creation of environments where independent thinking is not a risk, but the norm.

Today, the key question is this:

What kind of human do we need in a world where part of thinking is externalized?

And immediately after it:

What kind of educational system can actually form such a human being?

♜ If education fails to answer the second question, it may indeed be nullified – not by technology, but by its own inertia.

[1] An excerpt from an interview about education with Alexander Auzan (February 05, 2026) [link]

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