Artificial Intelligence is not knocking on the door; it’s in the classroom. It’s in our search engines, navigation systems, social media algorithms and learning spaces, shaping our future whether we are ready or not. How can we begin to think about AI in the future of education?
Colorado College’s ED300 Creative Critical Inquiry class tackled these questions collaboratively and heard global perspectives from policymakers, researchers and developers at UNESCO’s 2026 Digital Learning Week. The class also created a workshop in collaboration with — and presented at — the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Thinking about AI in learning spaces has led to emotionally charged backlash, with student and faculty concerns about student motivation, academic integrity and erosion of human connection.
Education systems across the world are responding differently, with some reverting to traditional low-tech teaching and others fully embracing it as a tool integrated into their infrastructure and instruction.
In the United States, the public education system is product and performance-driven, valuing knowledge like memorization, accuracy and efficiency over creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking. A University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review study found that education systems relying heavily on standardized testing to measure student achievement condition students to become “less creative and more automated,” ultimately stagnating their development of critical thinking skills.
Teachers are often overworked and undervalued, with pressure to cover volumes of content quickly, creating challenges in meeting individual student needs. Many students struggle with low motivation, engagement and self-efficacy. Many students also have limited access to individualized academic support or future-focused counseling due to lack of resources and staff shortages, disproportionately impacting low-income students and students of color.
If young people are our future leaders, researchers, innovators and teachers are the ones who shape them, how should education systems reflect the weight of that responsibility?
“I think that my emotions led me to a more interesting conclusion than just like I’m freaked out by AI or I don’t want it,” said Mica Hart ‘27, an ED300 student. “I think that listening to our emotions and listening to our instincts can point us towards what we value and that is super important.”
Throughout ED300 discussions and research, Hart was surprised to find that recent studies, including those reviewed in a 2026 Brookings Institution report, show AI tutors can improve learning gains, efficiency, knowledge transfer, motivation and engagement when paired with guardrails and human-AI collaboration.
According to the report, while introducing concerns surrounding accuracy, dependence and pedagogical judgement, tutoring enhanced by AI “critically … enables the kind of ‘private tutors, personalized syllabus and bespoke learning’ opportunities that were previously ‘available only to the privileged few.’”
“They’re pretty good at it in the ways that we teach students to learn and it made me rethink, like, are we actually teaching students the right thing?” asked Hart. “It has made me question the whole education system and the whole approach to creating future citizens and scholars and people who know how to do things and I think that, for me, my emotions led me to having this really big question, in partnership with the class.”
If AI is imposed onto already flawed education systems without direct cooperation with teachers and students or a critical lens, it will move us farther from solutions to existing problems, only replicating them in other ways.
“How do we get ahead of the game?” asked Mike Taber, Professor and Associate Chair of the Education Department at CC, who taught ED300.
“We have to be in the space of learning. We get back to the fundamentals, like the analogy of the First Nation people understanding the forest; the teacher understands their students and that ecosystem of learning space is the core,” said Taber.
Possibilities for innovation and problem-solving should always be at the center of our values of education and the future we want to empower young people to build. As a solution to identified problems and working in collaboration with teachers in localized contexts, AI has tremendous potential.
The global conversation is shifting to how AI can bridge gaps in access to high-quality education. AI can quickly train teachers in limited-resource contexts and provide individualized support and feedback for students who have fallen behind or have accessibility needs.
New research is exploring possibilities of data-efficient offline AI models that present opportunities to meet community needs with low-cost, localized, internet-free and private software in remote and rural low-resource contexts.
Participating in the discussion of AI in education is especially relevant for high school and college students, who grew up learning in a pre-AI-era and are about to enter the workforce. According to a Forbes report on Gallup research, tech workers who used AI less than monthly faced an 18% layoff risk, compared to 6% for frequent AI users, with one company attributing 40% of layoff announcements to AI. Developing AI literacy skills and understanding how AI works can make an applicant more competitive in the rapidly changing job market.
Saw Sow ‘28, a Business, Economics and Society major who took ED300, is scared about how AI will impact his future career. In class, if he doesn’t use AI for tasks like coding, he could be at risk of falling behind his peers.
“What we did at OECD was really cool, just creating that space to talk about our fears and emotions,” said Sow. “I just feel like we really need that at CC, so we can create a more collaborative community where you know AI isn’t a completely bad thing, but it’s about how we use AI as a society. How can our president or our student body create this space where it’s not looked down upon, but more of how can we utilize AI to help each other, but also be responsible users?”