Education
What are we educating children for?
For most of the last century, the answer was largely unspoken but consistent: for economic participation. For measurable performance. For the skills that a productive world requires. Schools were calibrated to produce capable people who could do the right things efficiently.
Now the most capable and efficient performer in most measurable domains is a machine. A student can submit an essay written by AI, answer a teacher’s question with AI, pass an exam with AI. If everything we value in education is what is measurable, then the question becomes impossible to avoid: what is school actually for?
That question was always worth asking. AI has simply made it urgent. And behind it lies an older, deeper question: what is a human being for? What does it mean to grow up, to be formed, to become someone — rather than simply to acquire skills and credentials and move on?
In current education, the best students are the fastest students, and that’s very dangerous because they go fast to a pre-described outcome. The faster you go, the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, for judgment, for pondering, for uncertainty. AI accelerates this — it produces answers at speed, and we mistake the speed for thinking. It speaks to the student as an intelligent adaptive organism, not as a self.
Education was always meant to be where human beings are formed, not only trained.
Essence of Humanity is developing pedagogical programmes that bring the Atlas into schools as a fundamental reorientation of what education is for — working with educators who believe that what a school forms in a child is more important than what it measures. Pilot programmes are in preparation across Portugal, the United Kingdom, India, and the United States.
The capacities in the Atlas are the ones that education has always, at its best, been cultivating: the ability to attend, to question, to inhabit uncertainty, to make meaning, to be moved by beauty, to encounter another person as genuinely other, to take responsibility for one’s own becoming. They have simply never been mapped, named, or placed at the centre of what schools do.
A great deal of my time with my students is spent on trying to make them understand why it is important to ask questions even when you have little or no hope to get a final answer. AI can give us answers to everything, but it cannot give us the capacity to live with what has no answer. That capacity is the core of political engagement, of self-understanding, of what it means to think at all.