(Part 1 here) (Part 2 here)(Part 3 here)
Some years ago, on the first day of a new school year, I watched a four-year-old grip his father’s hand as if the world depended on it. His new teacher was crouching a few feet away, patient, unhurried, her hand extended. For what felt like a very long time nothing happened; the boy stood rigid, eyes wide, caught between the safety of what he knew and the terror of what he didn’t. And then, slowly, he let go of his father’s hand and reached for the teacher’s.
I have thought about that moment many times since, because something happened in it that had nothing to do with information, or knowledge, or skill. A small human being, in a body flooded with fear, made a decision to trust another human. That decision did not happen only in his mind – it happened in his chest, in the pit of his stomach, and in his held breath. He didn’t think his way to courage; in a way, courage happened to him. The teacher, for her part, didn’t persuade him with an argument. She offered a hand, and waited for him to take it.
It is an unremarkable moment, repeated annually in schools around the world. But I think it contains something important about what education actually is, and about why AI may not be the threat that many of us currently fear.
The dignity problem
In my Theory of Knowledge classes, I always take students through what I call the grand paradigms – the big, unexamined mental models by which human beings have understood their own place in the universe. These models matter because they shape not just what we believe, but how we feel about ourselves – our sense of significance, of where our lives stand in the scheme of things.
For over two thousand years, the answer to that question seemed settled – and in the most flattering way possible to humans. The classical paradigm placed human beings at the centre of God’s design – created deliberately, loved specifically and positioned just below the divine in a cosmic hierarchy. Human dignity was not something we had to argue for because it was built into the architecture of the universe itself.
Then in 1543 Copernicus pulled the rug by showing that the Earth was not at the centre of anything – that we were one planet among several, orbiting an ordinary star, one among many billions. The facts were astronomical, but the wound was personal, because if the universe was not built around us, then perhaps we were not as central to God’s plan as we had assumed. Perhaps the whole story we had told ourselves about our own importance was wrong. The Catholic Church’s fury at Copernicus had nothing to do with planetary mechanics and everything to do with the terrifying implication that we might not matter as much as we thought.
Freud later called this the first of three great wounds to human self-regard. The second came from Darwin, who argued that we were not placed here by a creator but had evolved from other animals – sharing ancestors with apes, subject to the same blind forces of natural selection as every beetle and bacterium. This was painful, but survivable, because even as animals we could still point to something that set us apart. No beetle writes symphonies and no ape builds a cathedral. Even if we were animals, we were extraordinary animals – because of our minds. But Freud’s third wound went further: the discovery that we are not even fully in charge of those extraordinary minds. Below our conscious, rational thoughts lie drives and impulses we cannot see, let alone control. Even this, though, did not quite finish us off. A mind with a turbulent unconscious is still a mind, and still ours.
So through all three wounds, something of our self-regard survived. We might not be at the centre of God’s universe, and we might be animals with unruly unconscious minds, but we could still cling to Hamlet’s vision of humanity – how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the paragon of animals. Battered after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, perhaps, but not dethroned. The mind remained the last ground on which human dignity could stand.
AI is the wound that finally reaches it. Noble in reason? The machines will reason faster and more deeply than any human who ever lived. Infinite in faculties? The machine’s faculties are, for practical purposes, becoming so. In apprehension how like a god? The machine apprehends patterns across more data than any human mind could hold in a thousand lifetimes. For five centuries we grounded human worth in our cognitive superiority, and for five centuries that ground held – through Copernicus, through Darwin, through Freud. It is not holding now. And this, I think, is why the anxiety among parents and educators runs so deep. It isn’t just that jobs might change, or that schools might need to adapt, or that homework might become meaningless. It’s that the thing that we thought made us us – our minds, our intelligence, our capacity to reason – is no longer ours alone. Hamlet’s speech has run out of road. And the question it leaves behind is stark: if not our reason, if not our faculties, if not our godlike apprehension – then what?
I recently argued that wisdom might be the one construct AI cannot touch, but I’m no longer sure that’s right. The instinct to find a cognitive capacity that machines can’t reach is really an instinct to compete, and it is both futile and missing the point. Futile, because every cognitive peak we retreat to, the machines will eventually climb. And missing the point, because we have been here before. We do not lie awake feeling diminished because a crane can lift more than we can – when machines surpassed us physically, we simply stopped seeing human worth as grounded in strength. Unfortunately we grounded it in cognition instead, and that ground is also giving way. Unless, that is, the whole framing is wrong and the question what can humans do that machines can’t? is simply the wrong question.
If so, then the solution is to remember that our worth was never grounded in our ability to beat a machine in the first place. This is hard for us to see, because we have spent so long telling ourselves that thinking is what makes us special. The entire Western intellectual tradition, from the Greeks through Descartes and onwards, has valued the mind far more than the body. Our education systems were built on that assumption – which is why they narrowly test the mind, measure cognitive output and rank intellectual performance. But Descartes was wrong, and not just philosophically.
There is a tradition in philosophy and cognitive science – associated with thinkers like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Antonio Damasio – that has for decades argued that the separation of mind and body was always a mistake. We do not have minds that just happen to be instantiated in bodies; the connection is deeper than that. Our most abstract concepts – grasping an idea, weighing an argument, standing by a principle – are not accidentally physical metaphors. They reveal that our thinking is built, from the ground up, on the experience of being a creature that moves, reaches, balances, and falls. Damasio showed something equally striking: patients cut off from their emotional and physiological responses could weigh options, analyse evidence, lay out pros and cons as well as a machine. But they could no longer decide. They could reason about their lives but not navigate them, because choosing between options requires that some outcomes matter more than others, and mattering is something a disembodied logic system can only simulate, not generate. It is something that arises in an organism that has a life at stake. The disembodied mind has no such thing.
If this is right, then AI does not do what we do, only better; it does something genuinely different. We live, and our thinking is part of how we live. A machine can produce an output that may look like thought, but thought, in a human being, is not only an output. It is an act in itself, and as such inseparable from the physical limits of a nervous system that feels fatigue and hesitation, elation and urgency. That makes AI not a lesser or greater version of us; it’s a different thing entirely.
What matters and why
But this isn’t just about how we think, or how we differ from machines. It’s about what matters and why. We do not have to be the best at something for it to matter. A parent who reads a bedtime story to a child is not competing with an audiobook; a teacher who can’t sleep for thinking about how to reach the struggling student is not optimising output; the auntie who wipes the tables in the canteen at dawn, with quiet pride in her work, is not doing so because it is the most efficient use of her time. These acts have value not because they are efficient, or because a person does them better than a machine, but because they come from people for whom it matters – people with skin in the game, and limited time in which to play it.
This is a point about human dignity that does not depend on beating the machine at anything. It is the claim that certain things matter precisely because they are done by embodied, finite, mortal creatures who could have done something else with their limited time but chose to do this thing. The value is in the choosing, not the output. A machine cannot choose, because choosing – real choosing – requires having something at stake. It requires a life that is going somewhere, and that will end.
Two centuries of instrumentalism have taught us to measure education by its cognitive outputs – grades, credentials, career outcomes. That is exactly the mindset that makes AI feel threatening, because a machine that produces better cognitive outputs makes education look redundant. But if education is about something else then AI is not a threat. If it is about learning to choose with something at stake, about the encounter between a human being and something that doesn’t bend to their will, then AI is, at most, a very useful tool within a project that remains irreducibly human.
The body in the room
I have watched students on expeditions encounter mountains and open sea; they confirm David Whyte’s beautiful observation that there is a sacred otherness to the world which is breathtakingly helpful simply because it is not us. The mountain does not care about our exam results. It demands something else entirely: physical endurance, attention to the actual, a reckoning with a world that exists independently of our ambitions. That encounter cannot be digitised. You have to be there, in a body, in the wind, to be changed by it. Psychologists call what happens in such moments awe – an experience of vastness so powerful that we respond by re-organising how we see or even encounter the world. Awe is not a thought; it is a whole-person event, felt in the body, involuntary, irreducible to information.
But awe is not confined to mountains. I have seen it in the student whose eyes widen in that irreversible aha moment; in the athlete in flow; in the teenager on stage placing her whole self – voice, body, nerve – before an audience with no undo button; in the alumni who return and pinpoint a moment you cannot even recall that changed the direction of their life. These are embodied encounters. They are available only to people who are physically present and emotionally open. Available, in a word.
So the aspects of education we sometimes treat as supplements to the real business of developing minds – outdoor expeditions, sport, the arts, service learning, the messy human dynamics of a classroom – are not peripheral. They are central because they are the places where education engages the whole person, not just the cognitive slice that AI can replicate.
Progressive educators have long talked about head, heart and hands as three things to balance. But they were always one thing: body. Machines have already taken the hands without the head or heart; now AI threatens to take the head without the heart or hands, and to do it better than we do. What it cannot do is think as a body, with all the vulnerability, mortality, and stake in the outcome that implies. So Descartes was wrong. We are not minds riding around in bodies. We are bodies that think, and that’s a very different thing.
The next paradigm?
So back to the question I used to pose to my TOK students. What comes after the classical paradigm, the modern paradigm, the postmodern paradigm? What do we believe now?
The classical paradigm grounded human dignity in God. Copernicus took that away. The modern paradigm grounded it in mind. AI is taking that away and seems to leave a postmodern paradigm that offers humans only the status of random accidents in an indifferent universe. Meaningless.
But there is another possibility, and it is a very old one – an understanding that needed no argument when life was more physical than it is now, and one that we gradually lost sight of as we built systems that valued only what the mind could do. We can ground human dignity not in what we know, or what we can do, or what we can reason our way to, but in what we are. Embodied, mortal, finite, capable of suffering and of joy, embedded in relationships and in time. Not mind above all – but the thinking body and the feeling mind, inseparable. Shakespeare, as usual, saw both sides. In the same speech where Hamlet celebrates human reason – how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in apprehension how like a god – he arrives, in the very next breath, at something quite different: And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Dust – the body, the mortal thing that sweats and aches and will eventually decay. Hamlet meant it as a defeat, the glorious mind betrayed by perishable matter. But perhaps he had it exactly backwards. Perhaps the dust is not what diminishes our thinking but what gives it weight. Perhaps the dust is the point.
And if it is, then it was always there. It was in the child’s hand reaching for the teacher, in the student’s held breath on the mountainside, in Rina’s changed gait when she learned to hold her head high. It was there in every moment where education was what it was meant to be: the formation of a whole human being.
Schools that remember this have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence. Schools that forget it – that continue to reduce education to testable cognitive output – will lose to the machines, and probably should. Our societies have spent two centuries getting very good at teaching people to be smart, but the next chapter requires something both older and more radical: teaching them to be fully, vulnerably human. AI has not changed what matters; it has stripped away our excuses for forgetting.
References
Images created with AI (OpenArt and Gemini)
Damasio, A. (1994) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
Putnam. Keltner, D. and Haidt, J. (2003) Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion 17:2.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. Whyte, D. (1996) The Heart Aroused. Crown Business.
