AI appears intelligent not because it truly is, but because education globally has been systematically dumbed down. What we often interpret as technological brilliance is, in fact, a mirror reflecting the collapse of human creativity in formal learning.
For decades, the educational system has prioritised assessment over imagination, efficiency over exploration, and outcomes over understanding. We have replaced deep curiosity with standardised compliance. The purpose of education has drifted from awakening the mind to measuring its obedience.
The Lost Spirit of Learning
In the nineteenth century, John Ruskin warned that industrial society was eroding the very soul of craftsmanship and learning. He believed that education should cultivate the whole person, not just train the hand or the intellect. His student and collaborator, William Morris, argued that art and labour were inseparable expressions of human dignity.
Today, we face a similar crisis, only more mechanised. Our classrooms are filled with screens and data dashboards, yet starved of wonder. Students are conditioned to respond to metrics rather than to meaning. The industrial classroom has evolved into the digital dashboard, and the human learner is being reduced to an algorithmic node.
The Pedagogy of Compliance
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire described this phenomenon as the “banking model” of education, where knowledge is deposited into passive students. In such systems, questioning is discouraged because it disrupts efficiency. But creativity cannot exist without disruption. It is born in the messy, unpredictable process of trying, failing, and seeing differently.
John Taylor Gatto, in Dumbing Us Down (1992), famously criticised compulsory schooling for creating obedient consumers rather than independent thinkers. He observed that students are taught to fear risk, avoid failure, and accept authority without question — precisely the conditions that make artificial intelligence appear intelligent by comparison.
Similarly, Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society (1971), argued that institutions of learning had become bureaucratic machines, producing dependence rather than autonomy. What was once an act of liberation has become a ritual of conformity. The learner has been trained to perform intelligence rather than to live it.
Mistaking Automation for Intelligence
This is why AI now seems impressive. It does not think, dream or feel. It simply mirrors the immense volume of data we have fed it. Yet, in an educational landscape stripped of imagination, AI’s mimicry looks like mastery. The illusion of intelligence arises only because genuine creative thinking has been neglected.
True creativity does not follow a prompt. It cannot be reduced to a formula or a dataset. It resists easy measurement and thrives in ambiguity. It comes from the capacity to see beyond the visible, to find meaning in uncertainty. As Herbert Read wrote in Education Through Art (1943), creativity is the natural expression of the human spirit. When education suppresses that spirit, machines appear to rise above us.
Reclaiming the Human
The purpose of education must return to awakening minds rather than conditioning them. We need schools and universities that nurture perception, reflection and imagination, institutions that value thinking as much as doing, and being as much as achieving.
If we fail to do so, we risk a future where human thought becomes a shadow of machine simulation. But if we succeed, we might rediscover what Ruskin called the lamp of life: the spark that no algorithm can imitate.
True creativity is priceless because it is inseparable from the human condition itself.
References and Influences
- John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
- William Morris, Art and Socialism (1884)
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971)
- Herbert Read, Education Through Art (1943)
- John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
- Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (2015)
- Sir Ken MacAlpine, The Crisis of Education in the Modern World (2003)
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