When I was a child in Madrid, the classroom had a particular smell: white chalk dust, polished wooden desks, and the faint trace of damp coats in the cold winter days. We copied exercises from the blackboard, memorized long lists of historical dates, and recited them in front of thirty nine other silent classmates guided by Doña Teresa. Knowledge was something external, stable, printed in textbooks and embodied by teachers. If you wanted to know something, you raised your hand or went to the the teacher and ask.
Back then, machines did not answer questions nor wrote essays, and they certainly did not think.
Today, for all of us parents there is something very clear and at some points quite scary, and this is that our children are growing up in a world where artificial intelligence can summarize a novel, solve a math problem, generate a painting or simulate a debate in seconds. They are starting their lives in a world where the shift is not incremental but simply civilizational.
As parents and also educators we are no longer asking how to incorporate technology into education but we are actually asking how to educate our little human beings in a world where machines can replicate many cognitive tasks that once defined academic success.
Artificial intelligence in education is often framed as either salvation or catastrophical. On one hand, AI powered learning platforms promise personalized instruction, adaptive feedback, and unprecedented access to information. On the other, there are fears of cheating, cognitive laziness, and a generation that outsources its thinking to algorithms. I think both things make sense, even though the truth, as usual, may lay in the tension between these extremes. And the real question is not whether AI will shape education, but how we will shape our children in response.
When I think back to my years in school in that already old and dramatically different Madrid, what stands out is not the memorized content but the moments when a teacher asked a question that did not have a single correct answer. I remember a literature class where we debated the moral decisions of a character in a novel that I loved, one of our most famous militars Don Juan de Austria in the book written by Louis de Wohl. The discussion became animated, almost chaotic. For the first time, I felt that school was not about repeating information but about constructing meaning. That experience was formative. It taught me that knowledge is not merely stored but instead is examined, challenged, and interpreted.
In the age of AI, this distinction becomes essential because if machines can retrieve and synthesize information faster and more accurately than most humans, then education as we know it simply cannot remain centered on information retrieval. The old model, based on memorization and standardized reproduction of knowledge, clearly risks becoming obsolete.
On the other hand, what cannot be automated as easily is judgment, and what cannot be outsourced is the ability to question premises, detect bias, connect disparate ideas, and navigate ethical complexity...And this is where something called critical thinking becomes not a luxury but a survival skill.
The impact of AI on childrens education is already visible. Students use generative tools to draft essays, solve equations, and even code applications. Teachers use AI to design lesson plans, assess performance and identify learning gaps. The classroom is slowly transforming into a hybrid space where human and machine intelligence coexist.
The danger is not that children will use these tools, but that they will use them unreflectively, because if a child automatically accepts every AI generated answer as authoritative, we risk creating passive consumers of machine output rather than active thinkers, and to prevent this, education must shift from teaching answers to teaching inquiry. Instead of asking, “What is the correct solution” we must increasingly ask, “Why might this solution be flawed”
Students should learn to interrogate AI responses, asking themselves what data might this or that model be trained on, whose perspectives are missing, or what assumptions underlie this conclusion. And by turning AI into an object of analysis rather than an unquestioned oracle, we can cultivate on them intellectual autonomy.
This shift may lead to entirely new educational systems, and I would not find it strange if at some point in he near future, we see schools structured less around age based grades and more around competency based progression, or AI tutors providing individualized pathways while human educators focus just on mentorship, ethical reasoning and collaborative projects. In such a system, classrooms might resemble studios or laboratories rather than those spaces we grew up in. Students could work on interdisciplinary challenges designing sustainable cities, simulating public policy decisions, or creating digital art installations while AI assists with research and technical execution.
Another emerging possibility is the integration of “AI literacy” as a foundational subject, alongside mathematics and language. Children would not only learn how to use AI tools but how they function at a conceptual level, which is something radically different. They would explore algorithms, data bias and the societal implications of automation, and this knowledge would demystify the technology and empower them to engage with it critically. Just as digital literacy became essential in the internet era, AI literacy will become indispensable in the decades ahead.
Yet we must also guard against an overly technocratic vision of education. My memories of school include playground conversations, whispered jokes during class and the anxiety before oral exams. These experiences, trivial as they may seem, were profoundly human. They taught key things like resilience, empathy and social negotiation. No algorithm now or in the future will replicate the complexity of a child navigating friendships or confronting failure in front of peers, simply because education is not merely cognitive training but it is social formation.
Therefore, I think any future system must preserve the human core of schooling. AI can personalize instruction, but it cannot replace the moral authority and emotional presence of a teacher who knows a childs fears and aspirations. It cannot model integrity in the way a principled adult can. In fact, the more advanced technology becomes, the more valuable these human qualities may be.
Empathy, creativity, and ethical discernment will not diminish in importance but instead they might become the differentiating factors in a world saturated with intelligent machines.
For us parents, this transformation requires a change in mindset. Instead of banning AI tools outright or embracing them uncritically, we must guide our children in using them wisely. We can ask them to explain how they arrived at an answer, even if an AI assisted them. We can encourage them to compare multiple sources, including machine generated ones, and reflect with them on discrepancies. We can create family conversations about technology, power, and responsibility. In doing so, we will be modelling the critical engagement we hope they will internalize.
The stakes are high, because a whole generation that relies entirely on artificial intelligence for decision making risks losing its capacity for independent thought, but a generation that learns to collaborate with AI while maintaining intellectual sovereignty could achieve extraordinary things. They could leverage machines to solve complex global problems while grounding their actions in human values.
Looking back at that classroom in Madrid, with its chalkboard and orderly rows of desks, I do not feel nostalgia for a simpler technological era. I feel gratitude for the teachers who, within the constraints of their time, encouraged us to think beyond the textbook. Their lessons were not about the permanence of knowledge but about the discipline of questioning, and in an age where machines can generate essays in seconds, that discipline is surely more urgent than ever.
Education is no longer about preparing children for a stable job market defined by predictable skills, because maybe the job market we are used to will not longer exist for our kids in the future. It is about preparing them for a fluid landscape where roles evolve and cognitive tasks are shared with machines.
The ultimate goal is not to compete with artificial intelligence but to complement it. To do so, our children must develop a robust inner compass, melting together the ability to analyze, doubt, imagine, and choose.
If we succeed, the future of education will not be a story of human obsolescence but of human refinement. Artificial intelligence may think faster, but our children must learn to think deeper, and in that depth I think lies the enduring value of a truly human education.
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