Walk into any university faculty meeting these days and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: artificial intelligence is making students lazy, incurious, and dependent. Professors lament that tools like ChatGPT reduce critical thinking, undermine memorization, and short-circuit the learning process. They are not entirely wrong, but they are missing the point.
The problem is not that AI is inherently corrosive to education. The problem is that our education system is still designed for a world in which information was scarce, hard to access, and difficult to process. Schools are operating as if we’re in the 19th century, training students to hoard facts and reproduce processes that machines can now do instantly. In that light, it’s not surprising that AI looks like a shortcut for students and a threat to teachers. But in professional life, where outcomes matter more than reciting content, AI is celebrated as an accelerant to innovation. This paradox reveals what professors are missing: the true challenge is not suppressing AI, but redesigning education so students learn to live with it.
Information Isn’t the Goal Anymore
At its core, AI is an information processor. It can memorize, synthesize, and summarize at speeds human beings cannot match. If education is defined as memorization and basic synthesis, then AI renders much of traditional schooling obsolete. When students can arrive at the “objective” answer with a single prompt, professors worry they have skipped the hard work of thinking.
But here’s the reality: the hard work of thinking is not memorizing facts. It is not grinding through data acquisition that machines can handle. The real work is deciding what problems to pursue, what questions to ask, and what purposes to serve. In other words, education should not end at information, it should begin with intent.
The Astronaut Analogy
Consider the astronaut. No one expects astronauts to manually pilot their spacecraft through every stage of flight; the complexity is overwhelming, and the chances of failure astronomical. Instead, astronauts learn how to monitor systems, adjust parameters, and focus on the mission’s purpose. They leverage automation to go higher, further, and faster than any individual could manage alone.
Education should operate the same way. Forcing students to memorize reams of facts or execute calculations by hand is like demanding that astronauts personally steer the rocket. They will almost certainly crash. But give them AI copilots, and they can focus on mission design, interpretation, and new frontiers of discovery.
Raising the Bar Earlier
If AI accelerates the acquisition of basic knowledge, then students can, and should, be challenged earlier. Imagine giving sixth-grade problems to third graders who have AI assistants to help them navigate. Rather than dumbing down education, AI could actually raise the bar, pushing students to higher levels of abstraction, synthesis, and creativity at younger ages.
There are already precedents. Programs that give underprivileged students access to technology often show that children, when freed from rote drills, quickly teach themselves advanced concepts. The point isn’t that AI should replace learning, it’s that AI should change the level at which learning begins.
Creativity in the AI Era
The arts offer a powerful analogy. AI can now generate musical patterns, painting styles, and story arcs. But no matter how sophisticated the tool, the meaning of a song, the intention behind a painting, and the story a writer wants to tell remain profoundly human domains. Cameras automated lighting and composition, but the artistry of photography is in deciding when to press the shutter and how to frame the world.
Similarly, education must evolve into a practice of curation rather than capture. Students should be trained to use AI for the technical execution, while they themselves master the art of framing questions, discerning value, and shaping purpose.
What Professors Should Do Instead
Instead of banning AI from the classroom, educators should rethink their role. The 19th-century model of schooling, designed to prepare clerks and factory workers to process scarce data, no longer applies. Professors should embrace AI as the new baseline and move students beyond it. That means:
- Teaching students to question AI outputs, not just consume them.
- Designing assignments that emphasize intent, context, and ethical consequences rather than raw information.
- Encouraging cross-disciplinary exploration, since AI reduces the cost of entry into new domains.
- Prioritizing creativity, storytelling, and social impact, the areas where human insight remains irreplaceable.
The shift is not easy. It requires abandoning old metrics of success, like memorization and replication, in favor of new ones: originality, synthesis, and purpose. But resisting AI in the classroom is like resisting the calculator, the search engine, or the word processor. Each of these tools once seemed threatening, but each ultimately freed human beings to do higher-order work.
The Last Frontier
Professors are right to worry that AI can make students appear “dumber.” But the real dumbing down comes from clinging to an outdated vision of education. If we treat learning as data capture, students will always lag behind their machines. If instead we treat learning as human purpose-making, AI becomes an ally.
The last frontier of education is not memorization but meaning. Not calculation but creativity. Not replication but responsibility. Professors who miss this risk holding students back from the very future they are supposed to be preparing them for.
AI is not making students lazy. Our old model of education is. It’s time for schools to catch up to the world students already inhabit, one where information is abundant, and purpose is the true measure of intelligence.
Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.
If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.
