Column | AI in Education: Technology Should Serve Humanity Not Harm It

Gone are the days when artificial intelligence (AI) in education was a distant dream. It is quickly becoming a part of children’s everyday learning. Be it the intelligent tutoring systems and adaptive learning platforms or conversational AI, which can explain any complicated concept within a few seconds, technology is changing the way children learn, think and interact with knowledge.

AI presents unique and previously unavailable opportunities for today’s learners: personalised instruction, immediate feedback, 24/7 access to information and the ability to learn beyond the four walls of a classroom.

One of the things that speaks highly about AI is its capability in democratising education. Smart learning systems adapt to the pace of children who live in remote areas or need individual academic assistance, and are also useful for pupils who lack confidence. AI can help level the education playing field, assist students with learning disabilities and give teachers a heads-up as to how their students are doing. If used correctly, it can become one of the strongest educational tools to be known.

Schools Matter

Education has never just been about obtaining information. Learning is a human process that influences not just what children know, but who they become. Schools are not merely places where knowledge is exchanged, but social environments in which children learn empathy and resilience, confidence and persistence, ethical reasoning and self-regulation. An interesting question is—as AI becomes more of a learning companion, can it teach kids everything they need to know to grow into healthy, kind and emotionally resilient adults?

Through the lens of child development, relationships are the cornerstones of learning. Before children can solve maths problems, they learn to trust, cooperate and feel emotionally secure in their exchanges with adults. Teachers rise to become some of the most important people in a child’s life. They notice small shifts in behaviour, praise the child when they experience failure, celebrate minor successes, step in to mediate disputes between children and cultivate an environment where the classroom is a refuge for emotional safety.

The effects of these exchanges—though largely unnoticed—shape the mental-health trajectories of children. An engaged teacher can bolster a child’s confidence and help reduce his anxiety—factors that impact learning and can change the course of development for vulnerable students. Kids won’t always remember the lesson they learnt, but they’ll remember the teacher who believed in them. These are not algorithms or automated responses.

AI is good at things humans struggle with. It does not get annoyed listening to a particular question repeatedly. It can adapt as per a learner’s grasping abilities, provide personalised feedback, generate contextual explanations, render information in over 20 languages and be available at all times. These skills are essential for children who either learn differently or need more support. As a result of this, AI can also help minimise the embarrassment some students feel while asking questions and encourage engagement with independent learning.

However, learning is much more than getting correct responses. Children learn to understand feelings by watching facial expressions, reacting to the tone of voice, negotiating a disagreement with their classmates, comforting other children who are upset and observing how trusted adults handle problems. Such experiences develop empathy, cooperation and moral reasoning. They need real-life human connection and shared emotional experiences that simply cannot be replicated, even at a high level of sophistication, through AI.

Conversational AI can mimic empathy well, but that, by definition, is not true human understanding. AI can detect vague speech and produces comforting replies, but AI cannot feel compassion, care about humans or bear any responsibility. It’s not about emotions so much as it is about predicting words. To adults, this difference might be pretty clear. But for younger children, much more human-like AI systems may continue to blur the lines between real relationships and simulated ones.

This raises important questions. What might be the consequences to their interpersonal development if children began asking for emotional affirmation mostly from AI rather than adults? If classroom discussions fade and are replaced by one-on-one conversations with smart machines, will there be less chance for collaboration and negotiation? Many of these questions have been answered at the surface level, but they should be taken seriously.

Critical Thinking

Another major concern has to do with critical thinking—a big limiting factor of the remarkable efficiency of AI. Some students might have difficulty tolerating uncertainty, concentrating on a problem or questioning the information. Doing this as intellectual growth is often difficult—it means struggling through questions, the possibility of making mistakes, arguing with each other and reviewing our own plans. These are opportunities that good teachers deliberately manufacture because they know learning comprises not just knowing the right answer but developing a learner’s ability to think for oneself.

This is not to say that AI undermines critical thought by default. In contrast, when used wisely, AI can encourage curiosity, offer different views and support inquiry. It is not the technology but the context that makes the difference. AI should help promote inquiry and teachers are the ones who will teach students to interpret, critique and use AI-generated information responsibly.

AI or Teachers?

The fact that AI will replace teachers is the biggest misconception. Teachers get a lot more done beyond simply explaining concepts. They engender trust, encourage questions, discern emotional turmoil, demonstrate ethical behaviour, create community and support children through the challenges of growing up. These are relational processes grounded in empathy, human connection and lived experience. AI can assist in instruction, but the authenticity of these relationships cannot be replicated by AI.

So, the future of education should not be based on a competition between humans and AI. Instead, it should be a joint venture. The uses of AI in education can be personalisation, accessibility, reducing administrative challenges and improving instructional efficacy. Teachers should continue to play a vital role in teaching emotional health and well-being, resilience, ethical judgement and creativity— important social skills.

While celebrating the vast promises of AI, we need to make sure to ground technology firmly in human values. The final objective of education should not just be to create informed individuals but to produce kind and psychologically resilient citizens. Technology can help make this journey richer, but it cannot replace the relationships that give meaning to learning. Thus, the question is not whether children can learn from AI. The bigger question is whether they can grow into emotionally and socially healthy individuals when the influence of teachers is no longer long-lasting. Instead of selecting between AI and teachers, the future of education will be reliant upon ensuring that technology serves humanity and does not harm it.

(Views expressed are personal)

Jitendra Nagpal is senior psychiatrist at Moolchand Healthcare, Delhi

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 3 issue, 'The AI Divide', which focuses on how India's AI education ambitions are colliding with the reality of inadequate digital infrastructure, undertrained teachers and AI tools that are not built around Indian students' cultural context)