What Makes Education Educational?

[Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry]

AI can now write plausible essays, solve mathematics problems and explain almost any tricky subject-specific question within seconds. This presents an obvious challenge to schools and universities. If students can use AI to complete the work set for them then how do we know that they have learned anything? Behind this practical problem lies a more fundamental question. What were all those essays, problems and examinations supposed to achieve in the first place? If education amounted simply to producing correct answers, AI is just doing us all a favour by producing them more efficiently. Of course, we all know that education is more than this. But what exactly is that something more? What is it that makes education truly educational?

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that Paul Cézanne doubted whether conventional ways of painting could capture how we actually see the world, while continually questioning the truth of his own paintings. Conventional painting presented the world as already formed: objects had stable outlines, space followed geometrical perspective, and the viewer occupied a fixed position. Cézanne tried to reach beneath these conventions to perception as it is lived. In his paintings, contours emerge from colour, perspectives shift, and the familiar solidity of things appears in the process of taking shape.

This seems to me to be profoundly educational. Cézanne does not merely show us another collection of objects. He changes how we see. That movement from accepting a finished appearance to understanding the process through which it has been formed is, I think, central to education.

Cambridge Engineering has a global reputation not only for teaching students how existing technologies work but for enabling them to design things that work differently. Professor Nathan Crilly, who teaches engineering design and problem-solving, demonstrated this approach in a workshop for the Cambridge Digital Education Futures Initiative.

He showed how a problem can be opened up by comparing it with an apparently unrelated object, situation or story. The analogy loosens our initial definition of the problem. It enables us to see connections and possibilities that were previously hidden.

Like Cézanne’s painting, this approach disturbs the apparent solidity of the world. But engineering also adds something important. It shows that what has been formed in one way can be formed differently.

Students must, of course, acquire established knowledge and skills. An engineer cannot redesign a bridge without understanding the principles that keep it standing. But the educational purpose of that knowledge is not simply to reproduce bridges that have already been built. It enables students to understand why things have taken their present form, assess the good and the bad aspects of every design and then participate with others and with tools like AI in designing something that offers a different and possibly better answer to the challenges that are given to us by the world.

I arrived at the idea that education is essentially about expanding dialogic space through research with groups of children solving reasoning-test puzzles. The most successful groups were not those in which one child quickly supplied the correct answer. They were groups that could think together better than any individual member. We measured this by comparing the group’s performance on reasoning tests with the members’ performance when working alone.

Video recordings helped us see how this collective intelligence emerged. Before breakthroughs, there were often periods of shared silence in which everyone focused together on the problem. Children openly voiced uncertainty: “I don’t get this at all.” They reconsidered their initial judgments: “No, it can’t be that one.” They also displayed humility and openness by asking others for help: “I don’t see it—can you explain?” These were not signs of failure or confusion. They were ways of opening a shared space in which a better understanding could emerge.

This is what I mean by dialogic space: the space of possibility that opens between and around people when they listen to one another, hold back from immediate conclusions, and allow different perspectives to interact.

It opens when the first answer is not accepted but questioned. It widens as other voices and possibilities enter. It deepens when participants question their initial assumptions and listen for a different way of understanding the problem to emerge.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at once. Something similar was happening in these groups, but collectively, and their achievement went further than just tolerating contradiction. It was to be able to sustain the space between opposed ideas until a better understanding could emerge.

The experience of dialogic space and its role in solving problems helps to clarify the traditional distinction between training and education. Training enables us to perform an established operation successfully. We might be trained to use a machine, follow a procedure, solve a familiar kind of equation or reproduce an accepted account of a historical event.

The difference between training and education lies in how learners relate to knowledge. Training can remain the acquisition of a predetermined performance for an external purpose. But it can also become part of education when it begins with a meaningful problem or challenge and draws learners into understanding, questioning and taking ownership of the practice. Education develops not only the ability to perform, but the judgment to know when and why a practice is appropriate, the capacity to adapt it to new contexts, and the enterprise to develop it further.

We can see the difference in almost any field. Someone might be trained to apply a scientific formula without understanding why it works. A medical student might memorise the standard treatment for a condition without yet being able to judge a complicated case. A history student might reproduce the lecturer’s account of the Reformation without comparing it with other interpretations or examining the evidence. In each case, successful performance may conceal the absence of education.

Acquiring knowledge and skills, wonderful as this is, only becomes educational when this changes us: changing how we see, opening new possibilities and increasing our capacity to make responsible judgments and take appropriate action.

Opening, widening and deepening dialogic space means developing both answerability and authorship. To be answerable is to recognise that we cannot simply say whatever suits us. We must answer to other people, to evidence, to inherited knowledge and to the reality we are trying to understand. Cézanne was answerable to the mountain that he painted many times, he refused to allow the conventions of painting to see it on his behalf. He had to offer his own answer to the question that it posed. The necessary complement of answerability is what I call authorship. Educated people become authors of their own lives rather than merely living out roles given to them by others or by circumstance. Authorship is linked to authority, leadership and enterprise: it means being able to judge, respond and speak in a voice recognisably your own. This does not mean creating ourselves or the world out of nothing. It means responding to the call of life, to its challenges, questions and possibilities, in ways that take both ourselves and the world forward.

The educated person is therefore neither merely obedient nor arbitrarily self-assertive. Answerability without authorship becomes deference; authorship without answerability becomes irresponsibility. Education requires both the capacity to listen and respond to what is already there, and the growing capacity to participate in creating something new and possibly better.

Imagine two students using AI to consider a question, perhaps why the First World War began. The first asks for an essay, makes a few changes and submits it. The second begins with an interpretation of their own. They ask the AI to challenge it, identify contrary evidence and present the strongest competing explanation. They struggle to reconcile the different accounts and eventually arrive at a conclusion they can defend.

Both students have used AI. Both may produce competent essays. But it is mainly the second who has been engaged in education. For the first student, AI closed the dialogic space by supplying a finished answer. For the second, it helped to open and widen that space by introducing questions, objections and alternative possibilities. The student remained responsible for deepening the dialogue and reaching a judgment.

Education is needed to enable and empower students to use AI for their own purposes, rather than being used by AI systems for purposes they neither understand nor control.

But this challenge is not new. What AI reveals is the extent to which education has already been shaped by an earlier technology: print literacy and the institutions built through and around it. Much of our existing educational system confuses successful performance with education, rewarding students for producing expected answers, passing examinations and accumulating marks while paying less attention to whether their relationship to knowledge and so their capacity to judge and act has been transformed. It is often less concerned with education than with training students to compete for and find a place within a vast bureaucratic machine organised around the affordances of print.

By making this confusion between performance and education so clearly visible, AI offers us a great opportunity to rethink what we are doing in education. The answer is not to reject technology and return to a fantasy of the ‘human’ untrammelled by technology. It is to recover what is most educational about education: the expansion of dialogic space.

This expansion is not only a matter of entertaining more voices or possibilities. It changes who we are. Through education, what first confronts us as an external world of knowledge, practices and technologies becomes something we can understand from within, identify with and participate in shaping. This is an expansion of interiority, but not of the isolated self. The educated person becomes both answerable to the larger process and an author within it, both shaped and shaping, listening and responding. Education enables us to become more fully conscious participants in the dialogue through which both we and the world continue to be formed.