Generative artificial intelligence has quickly woven itself into daily life. In schools across the world, students now consult chatbots for homework help while teachers use apps to draft lesson plans. This revolution has happened at an astonishing speed: ChatGPT was released only in late 2022. The potential for the technology has fueled its rapid expansion.

GenAI did not knock politely on the school gate; it came in through Wi-Fi. Unlike earlier waves of education technology, much of GenAI is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The user experience is intuitive, with no prior training or coding skills required. The technology can support a wide range of tasks, from drafting essays to creating learning experiences, all within seconds.

But GenAI is not a magic wand. It is more of an accelerator that amplifies good teaching as easily as it magnifies poor practice. GenAI can help create a truly level playing field, embracing the diversity of learners so that everyone succeeds. But it can also widen the gaps, powering those with the right resources and leaving others further behind. For example, GenAI can empower teachers to become creative designers of innovative learning experiences, but it can disempower them to become slaves of scripted lesson plans or algorithms they don't even understand.

GenAI can help reduce human bias through better data, but it can also amplify and entrench bias. It can connect people across geographical, linguistic or cultural boundaries, but it can also sort them into echo-chambers that amplify their own views and insulate them from divergent thinking. GenAI is ethically neutral, but the people who use it are not.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Digital Education Outlook 2026 highlights both the promise and the problems related to GenAI. GenAI tools can support learning when guided by clear teaching goals or designed specifically for education.

However, GenAI removes the productive struggle essential for learning. Students may complete tasks faster and achieve better immediate results, but their understanding may not be deeply consolidated. This can diminish cognitive stamina, deep reading, sustained attention and perseverance. Without a clear pedagogical purpose, GenAI can foster what researchers call "metacognitive laziness" and disengagement.

Using non-education specific GenAI tools for learning also has limitations. Studies show that students improved the quality of their responses when studying with a general purpose GenAI tool but their performance in exams did not improve. In some cases, it even got worse. In contrast, GenAI tools that are especially built for learning show more promise. These are designed with clear pedagogical intent and grounded in the science of how people acquire knowledge and skills. These tools can lead to better learning outcomes when used as a creative or collaborative learning partner, or as a virtual research assistant.

Early trials suggest that GenAI-powered tutoring assistants increased the capacity of human tutors to help students solve problems. Less-experienced tutors assisted by GenAI used better tutoring strategies and their students' mastery of mathematics improved significantly. Interactive chat-based teacher training tools, which allow novice teachers to practice teaching with simulated students, led to better teacher preparedness and confidence.

GenAI works best when used to enrich learning and improve learning quality, not replace cognitive effort or reduce the professional judgement of teachers. Education systems should therefore prioritize tools that are explicitly designed and co-created with teachers and students, tested rigorously and aligned with clear pedagogical goals. By doing so, GenAI can better support teachers and equip learners with essential GenAI literacy skills that will be important for success in the future labor market.

Most importantly, we need to pay greater attention to the kind of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that education should foster in a world dominated by AI. It is tempting to see AI as a force that grows human capacity while quietly eroding human agency. If machines mimic our abilities and take over our tasks, what will remain for us?

This is not a slow retreat as humans yield more and more ground to algorithms. At our best, we can fulfill far more than the sum of isolated, automatable tasks by bringing together a rich blend of cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-cognitive skills. We can see the bigger picture, make nuanced judgments, design solutions, communicate ideas and bring them to life.

The rise of GenAI should not diminish this but sharpen our focus on it. If routine skills are increasingly handled by machines, then education systems must give greater weight to human capabilities that cannot be reduced to code.

We need to better articulate the difference between human and artificial intelligence, between intelligence that develops and evolves over a long adaptive process, guided by consciousness and biology, and intelligence that develops through a mechanical process.

Education in the industrial age figured out how to educate second-class robots. In the age of GenAI, we will need to figure out what it means to be human, and how we can guide, rather than substitute, the AI we have created in our computers. Perhaps the biggest risk is not that GenAI is becoming human but that GenAI infantilizes us and makes us give up essential human capabilities, trading human autonomy in for convenience.

Therefore, tomorrow's education systems need to help students to think for themselves and to help them develop a strong sense of right and wrong. We should treasure our capacity to think about our own thinking, to navigate complex relationships, to exercise ethical judgment under uncertainty, and to create something genuinely new.

These are not just abstract concepts. They are what education is all about, and they belong to the pillars on which we build our societies. If education doesn't protect such human capabilities with determination, GenAI could wash away the very foundations of our societies.

The author is the director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

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