By Shai Tubali
During a recent visit to a primary school, Gert Biesta came upon a scene that delighted him. In the craft room, children were handed an open invitation: “Here you have materials, cardboard, glue, and sticks. During this hour, you can make anything you want to make.” There was no example on the blackboard, no correct version waiting at the end. What could have looked like a simple craft lesson became, for him, a real encounter with freedom.
As Biesta put it in a conversation with Big Think, such a task is much harder than being told what to do: “It’s being confronted with your own freedom, when you need to figure out: What do you do if no one tells you what to do?”
This is the space Biesta — a widely influential philosopher of education and professor of public education at Maynooth University in Ireland — has struggled to defend for decades. He argues it’s been shrinking in schools that prioritize speed, efficient learning, and measurable outcomes. To him, nothing has done more to minimize that space than AI: a machine almost designed to hurry us past the moment of not-knowing before we have had any real chance to inhabit it.
Language models can speed up or automate tedious tasks, and modern models generate mostly sensible and polished output that can be incredibly convenient. But classrooms arguably need friction. Students who let AI write their essays risk ceding their intelligence and effort to a system that moves quickly toward a predescribed outcome. “The faster [the students] go,” Biesta said, “the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.”
These are the moments that matter most for Biesta, because they make a student stop, sit with not-knowing, and face the deeper question: What should you be asking for? When everything’s at your fingertips, what’s wise to pursue?
“AI is a highly addictive technology. It easily sucks you in and then makes you forget yourself.”
Gert Biesta
AI can’t yet answer those types of questions, which is one reason why Biesta prefers not to view it as a one-size-fits-all solution to tasks and problems, but rather more narrowly as a tool. He offers a carpenter analogy: If the only tool you have is a hammer, and you think it can do everything, you are not a good carpenter.
Above all, AI invites dependency. “The biggest challenge I see is that it’s a highly addictive technology, and therefore, it easily sucks you in and then makes you forget yourself,” Biesta said, suggesting that this is an old danger intensified by each new cycle of digital technology. (The research literature on AI’s addictive potential is sparse and contested, though some recent studies have found behavioral patterns similar to other forms of dependence on digital technologies.)
Biesta draws a line from social media like TikTok to generative AI: Both can feel so fast and immediately gratifying that it can be difficult to pause and contemplate what you’re viewing or how you’re interacting with the technologies. “Before you know it,” Biesta said, “you’re on the inside of that.”
The challenge, he stressed, is to remain in a relationship with everything the world offers without losing yourself. In education, this means helping students develop and preserve the capacity to stop and ask, “Should I be doing this?”
Biesta agreed that machines can make certain types of judgments: the ones that work by rules, branches, and decision trees. If this, then that. A machine can do this very well. Modern language models are even more complex, operating based on probabilities rather than strict rules. Yet beyond a certain point, he said, there is a whole dimension of judgment that cannot be reduced to such procedures. This kind of judgment has to do with a sense of duty: not simply choosing between options, but reflecting on the direction one should take.
Long before the explosion of generative AI, Biesta used a simpler machine to make this point: a robot vacuum cleaner. Put it in a room once, and it bumps into table legs, chair corners, walls, perhaps even a dog or a cat. Send it through the same room again, and it adjusts its route, becoming more effective and intelligent in navigating the space. “But what the robot vacuum cleaner can never do is to judge whether the room it is put in is a room worth cleaning or not,” Biesta said. More than that, it cannot ask what kind of world its efficiency is serving: “Put it in Putin’s office or Zelensky’s office, and it will just do the work.”
“Education should raise the question: What will you do with what you have learned?”
Gert Biesta
This is not to say that machines do not learn. “Learning means that artificial intelligence systems can adapt to situations they are in,” Biesta said, “and they can become better and quicker at adjusting.” But for him, moral awareness lies outside the scope of learning. This is also where the human being stands apart from both intelligent animals and machines. “I often use a beautiful phrase from the ancient Chinese Confucian philosopher Xunzi: ‘Birds and beasts have intelligence but no sense of duty,’” he said. “We now can add: ‘Birds and beasts and machines have intelligence, but the machine [also] has no sense of duty.’” Artificial intelligence may imitate moral awareness, but that must be programmed in advance — intelligence alone cannot arrive at judgment. We, by contrast, can have a sense of duty. “‘What should I do?’ is always a question for us,” Biesta said.
This is why he insists so strongly that learning is not the point of education: “For me, this is one of the biggest confusions in contemporary educational scholarship and policy. People say, ‘The school is a place for learning,’ or ‘The job of a teacher is to make students learn.’ If you want to learn, you don’t need a school or a teacher; you will learn an awful lot by being on the street or having a job at McDonald’s.”
Intelligence adapts; conscience interrupts. For Biesta, the ultimate purpose of education is rather counterintuitive and provocative: to disturb the flow of learning: “Education should raise the question: What will you do with what you have learned?” Without such interruptions, learning can leave us sophisticated and efficient, yet morally asleep.
To help students remain with these moments of slowing down, interruption, and thoughtfulness, Biesta uses concrete educational techniques. One example is the familiar reflective essay. Long before AI, he had already seen how easily students could become fluent in that genre without being moved by it at all. So he began replacing the familiar question, “What have you learned?” with a harder one: “Can you describe how you’ve been in a situation?” — a question that hopefully draws students back into the living encounter itself.
What Biesta hopes to protect is a sense of “self-uncertainty.” “When people are 100% certain of themselves, they become very dangerous, because they no longer carry the possibility of doubt about their own actions,” he said. That small, uncomfortable space of self-uncertainty is, for him, the very basis of moral consciousness. Conscience becomes a kind of double knowing: You do not merely act as an intelligent organism, but enter into a reflective relation with yourself. You watch yourself act. And as you move ahead, you ask whether you should be moving ahead at all.
He admitted that it is demanding work to keep this moment of doubt alive. “[Yet] this is what it means to lead a human life,” he said, to carry within yourself the recurring question: “Hey, wait a minute — is this going the way it should be going? Am I being pulled into a meaningful direction?” It is less a stable capacity than a life practice, something one must do again and again.
This has everything to do with education, Biesta said. He warns against educators thinking they should help young people become certain of themselves or simply find their identity. What education can do instead is practice a pedagogy of interruption: not telling the young how to live, but interrupting their direction of travel, troubling their familiar ways of being and doing, so that hesitation remains possible. He often returns to Martin Buber’s striking phrase: “The first task of educators in our time is to ‘keep the pain awake.’” That pain, Biesta said, is the pain of conscience, the difficulty of regularly asking whether one is going in the right direction.
Biesta often wonders how we can help one another keep moments of hesitation and thoughtfulness alive, not just in children, but also in adults living in a society that pulls us in every direction. One answer, he suggested, is to fill our lives and the lives of our children with real things. Reality does not give us exactly what we want, and that is its gift. It interrupts our flow. It slows us down. It makes hesitation possible.
“There are a lot of concerns about the challenge that we no longer know what truth is — that we have post-truth, fake news, and all that,” Biesta said. “But another crisis has to do with our sense of what is real.” AI is part of that crisis. It has unsettled the world of images, which many once trusted as windows into reality. More broadly, technology crowds life with the virtual, from immersive digital worlds to 3D printers. “People say about 3D printers: ‘You can print anything you can think of.’ But then it all has to come from your thinking, and the material doesn’t help you to see that not everything you can think is actually meaningful to do,” Biesta said.
“When you encounter stuff that is real, it offers resistance. It doesn’t allow you to do anything you want to do with it.”
Gert Biesta
This drift away from the real, he argued, belongs to a larger cultural pattern: We have organized life in much of the developed world around getting what we want quickly and efficiently — shopping as a way of being. He pointed to Paul Roberts’s The Impulse Society, which shows what goes wrong when instant gratification becomes a social principle: “We never take the time to ask what is worth wanting at all.”
The encounter with what is real, Biesta stressed, is different: “When you encounter stuff that is real, it offers resistance. It doesn’t allow you to do anything you want to do with it.” A garden teaches this well: Plants grow at their own pace, and trying to force them often destroys them. More challenging still is the encounter with another human being, who will not necessarily do what we want. Sometimes this becomes unmistakable in the life of a parent, when your child turns and says, “No, I’m not going to do this!” In that moment, you meet a reality that refuses your script. You cannot simply press harder and get your way.
That is why Biesta urges schools to surround children with gardens, animals, and real materials. If everything becomes textual and virtual, he warned, we lose one of the few remaining powers that can still stop us in our tracks and call us back to ourselves.
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