What’s the Role of AI in Education?

TLDR: An ideal education blends human-led teaching, interpersonal relationships, and artfully crafted curriculum with AI for instant feedback, individualized tutoring, self-paced growth, and administrative relief.

Today in 2026, how reliable is AI? Is it wise to completely trust it? If we’ve played with AI much, we’ve surely experienced it presenting false information with a fool’s confidence. And while AI may be quick to apologize, to tell the user how right they were, and how it won’t happen again, it inevitably does. Now what if it were a student, a child, asking a trusted resource for information? Would the child have the acumen or awareness to catch misinformation? Or would they unwittingly absorb, internalize, and build upon that falsehood? Even if they catch it, it still costs them time because they must invalidate the inaccurate data, then search further for accurate information. But if they don’t catch it, it costs them dearly – effort uprooting the old idea, effort planting the new, more accurate idea, then effort recalibrating everything else that was based on that initial falsehood. This retards the learning process. We need to do it right the first time.

As it stands today, AI isn’t developed enough to be wholeheartedly trusted. We’re not there yet, the technology is still evolving, its potentials still unfolding.

Now, distilled to its essence, AI is essentially an extremely powerful analytics engine running on all the data on the internet – which calls into question all the data on the internet. Who monitors what information is allowed and disallowed online? Or allows and disallows access, privacy? What about misinformation? Or disinformation? Facts must still be checked; the veracity of the data must be tested and proven. But this is no different than any other time in history.

Before AI there were internet search engines, and before the internet there was the library, and there have been libraries on this planet for nearly 5,000 years. And across those five millennia, a golden rule has persisted: check multiple sources. This held true for papyrus scrolls in the sands of Ancient Egypt and it remains just as true for artificial intelligence in the digital world. Now whether on scroll or server, the root of what we’re playing with here is information; data. So how is that information generated in the first place? Where does it come from? From us. Humans. The metadata generated by our every act, the results of experiments we conduct, the thoughts and feelings we express and share, the new models we synthesize and release into the world. Incidentally, this is in part what makes science so powerful: it’s a seeking of natural fact, a crafting of models to explain, predict, and harness natural phenomena. This is some of the most powerful information in the universe, and at the present, this all happens via experimentation, conceived of and conducted by human beings. There may come a time when AI can think up and run experiments for us, perhaps even better than us, but that day has not yet come. And with that said, the only way to know if something is indeed the truth is to test it ruthlessly. Only then can we be confident in our knowledge. Check multiple sources, pay attention to their overlap, and test everything.

One big difference between AI and classical analytics is the degree of generative capability, and this is where students can slip into trouble. It’s tempting to feed a prompt into AI and produce a 5-hour paper in 30 seconds because now we have 4hrs 59min 30sec more to play with our friends. But similar to how the body would atrophy if we had someone do everything physical for us, the mind too atrophies if we allow something external to ourselves do all of our thinking for us. If we let AI do our math homework for us, our mind doesn’t grow strong; it never exerts itself, never struggles, and so never develops, and we remain woefully inexperienced in solving problems. An elegant solution to a difficult problem is a hallmark of a brilliant mind, and life is full of problems, so it’s advantageous to have a powerful mind and to be good at solving problems. Or do we think AI is going to solve all our problems?

Now, AI is most certainly not to be overlooked either. It’s not a trend that will fade into obscurity, it has enormous potential, it’s an idea with unexplored possibility. And when exploring an idea, it’s often useful to polarize that idea into its extremes and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each pole. Here, our two extremes are: 100% AI and 0% AI.

In a purely AI approach, no humans, there are advantages and disadvantages, but the most obvious gap is the human element. We’ve all had something artificially flavored before, at least a candy or chips or a soda at least once in our lives. For instance, we may know that the flavor we’re enjoying in an artificial treat is strawberry because it tastes like strawberry, it smells like strawberry, its wrapper has a strawberry on it… but there’s something unnatural about it. It’s not really strawberry. It may be pretty darn close too, and taste legitimately delicious, but we perceive its artificiality. Same with AI generated music – it can produce some cool stuff, but something’s a little off, feels funny. Something’s missing from AI generated poetry too, there’s a hollowness, an emptiness filling the flowery buzzwords. These things are unnatural. This phenomenon is an absence of naturality. And the subconscious can tell the difference.

On the other hand, AI has been proven quite effective at instantly providing individually-tailored feedback and instruction. This is powerful because it allows students to grow and develop at their own rate and to run through the material at their own pace. Students can blaze ahead where it feels easy or spend extra time where it still feels rough, all while receiving 100% individual attention and 100% individualized curriculum, anytime, day or night. There are also no human resource constraints, so every student in a 30-student cohort could be studying at 3am with a 1×1, personally attuned AI tutor. Furthermore, in a 100% AI environment there wouldn’t be any human teachers, and this is a curious position for a business.

This lack of need for humans would eliminate a ton of cost (salary, benefits, HR department, etc.) and spike profitability. But who’s running the show here? And who’s checking curriculum to ensure coherence, and most especially, accuracy? Who’s evaluating the feel of the experience, what it’s actually like to be a young student run through the machine? And what about the emotional connection between a student and their peers and their teacher, those beautiful relationships that form? Or the enlightening exchange of ideas among classmates and their teacher? There’s a classic line in the 1979 IBM training manual that says, “A computer can never be held accountable; therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” AI can’t be held accountable either, and so it ultimately comes down to a human.

So, a 100% AI environment isn’t ideal, what about a 0% AI environment? Those kids would quickly be left behind. At the most basic level, AI is useful at the very least because it how rapidly it can look up and compile information; it can perform research. This eliminates the time spent weeding through information and helps us arrive at conclusions and solve problems faster. Imagine still using an abacus instead of a calculator, or going to a library over the weekend to write a research paper by hand instead of using the internet and a laptop. These notions are laughable today, and so too will be abstention from AI in the future. We’ve already seen what 0% AI looks like, it’s what we’ve done for thousands of years until extremely recently. AI is a tool with capabilities to improve that experience.

At the end of the day, the most likely scenario is a hybrid approach. AI bears potential in education that would be foolish to leave untapped, but we would be equally as foolish to completely forego some of the more natural, classical elements of the learning experience. In Finland’s middle schools, for instance, physical books were heavily replaced with laptops and digital instruction for several years in an effort to harness the power of technology in the classroom. This, however, resulted in a marked decrease in concentration, reading speed, and national learning outcomes. Then, in a curious experiment in Fall ’24, the town of Riihimäki reverted back to traditional paper materials and handwritten homework, whereupon they observed a notable increase in concentration, reading speed, retention, and understanding, essentially equivalent to what was lost in the digital transformation.

The ideal situation, therefore, would be to use AI for what it’s best-suited, and to retain the right kind of human touch. Curriculum should be developed by humans and intentionally wrapped around the minds of children, just as a skilled human can write a more soulful story or a more stirring poem than AI can generate. Instruction should always be led by a human, and students should be in class with other human students because as iron sharpens iron, the questions and ideas of one mind help sharpen another. On the flipside, AI should be thoroughly trained on that excellent, human-written curriculum, then it should be harnessed to grade all student homework. It could spit out a score on the spot, provide 2 strengths and 1 weakness to facilitate student development, offer hints for any problems missed to help the student grasp the concept, load the grade into the gradebook, and send a report to parents. As a result, the child could use the hints from AI to fix missed problems and resubmit, receiving new hints for anything still missed, as many times as necessary, until full understanding are achieved. Instant feedback for the student, immediate opportunity to improve, and the choice to get 100% A+ based purely on effort. This also means no grading for the teacher either, which could cause them to drift out of touch with their students… but AI could produce a brief report for the teacher each week revealing how the class as a whole is doing, where they could use more help, and how each individual is performing. AI could easily serve such analytics and diagnostics to each teacher every week to inform their instruction.

Some tasks are best handled by humans, namely those that involve genuine human interaction. Things like teaching, sales or business negotiation, athletic coaching, art – anywhere a soul touches another soul. Education is the cultivation of human potential, relationships are formed, goals are achieved, feelings are felt. Good teaching is infused with fun and laughter, with feeling, things that can’t be artificially synthesized. A good teacher breathes life into the curriculum and helps create a special experience for the class and the individual, and just like AI art or fake flavoring, we humans can perceive the difference. The subconscious cannot be deceived.

In education AI is particularly useful in performing repetitive, routine tasks, automating administrative work, and freeing both students and teachers alike to immerse themselves in the material and in the beautiful experience of learning. The trick is not allowing students or teachers to slip into complacency. The worst possible outcome of AI from an educational perspective would be lazy, out-of-touch teachers and feeble-minded, unthinking students, with homework being both generated by and corrected by artificial intelligence. This is the trap we must avoid. The ideal is a real, human experience: humans with less experience being guided by humans with more experience through artfully crafted, genuinely human curriculum. No administrative burden on the teacher, instantaneous 1×1 AI grading, feedback, correction and hints for students. Full visibility for parents. This is the best of both worlds. Kids come in with full understanding because of individualized learning (or at least awareness of their gaps), and teachers help integrate that understanding and provide a positive, exciting, human experience. This is how we accelerate human development without losing what makes us human.