Perspectives

What Education Must Achieve in the Age of AI

On character education and the question of who gets the opportunity to change something.

Adib Reyhani ·

Artificial intelligence can provide explanations, formulate arguments and draft project plans. People have to decide which goals they pursue and what responsibility they take on. Education should enable young people to make well-founded decisions together with others. Whether they get real opportunities to do so is also a question of educational equity.

Whoever sows a tree seed at Escuela N° 25 in Argentine Patagonia may not plant it in the forest themselves. Years of care lie in between. One group begins a piece of work that others later continue.

Since 2006, the school in Villa Futalaufquen has run a tree nursery with native species. It started with a forest fire and the children’s question of how they could help the forest recover. As Infobae reports, more than 32,000 trees have since been planted in Los Alerces National Park. The 38 children and young people currently at the school take part. They learn to tell species apart, to work out germination rates and to calculate costs. At the same time, the project can only continue if people work together reliably over years.

This task raises an educational question that AI makes newly urgent: what should young people learn and experience for themselves when machines can produce more and more results for them?

An AI can suggest a planting plan and explain what conditions a seedling needs. Anyone who wants to judge such a plan needs knowledge of their own. Anyone who carries it out must also decide with others, divide up tasks and respond to difficulties. The availability of an answer does not relieve those involved of this responsibility.

That is why an education debate falls short if it confines itself to when and how AI should be used in the classroom. Just as important is the question of what young people can use their growing abilities for. Do they get the chance to investigate problems themselves? Are they allowed to make decisions whose consequences reach beyond a grade? Do they experience that their contribution matters to others?

Knowledge remains fundamental for this. Anyone who wants to change an injustice must be able to understand connections, check claims and weigh possible consequences. Reading, writing and arithmetic open up access to the world and make independent judgement possible. Receiving a ready-made answer does not replace this process. That is precisely why education should combine knowledge with opportunities to use it responsibly.

This also implies a mandate for character education. What is meant is the development of honesty, a sense of justice, care and reliability: qualities that show in how people treat others, especially when things get difficult. Admitting a mistake even though you might lose recognition. Carrying on with a task when the initial enthusiasm fades. Objecting to a decision that benefits your own group but disadvantages others.

Such capacities grow through practice, through role models and through reflecting on one’s own experiences. One’s own development can be closely linked to a contribution to community life. Those who commit themselves to a task with others get to know their own abilities and limits. At the same time, something comes into being that matters beyond the individual’s own learning.

Good intentions alone are not enough, however. Even a well-meant project can miss what the people it is meant to benefit actually want. Anyone who wants to organise a games afternoon for younger children, for example, would first need to talk to them and their families. What would they like? Which activities do they already take part in? What would they like to help with themselves? Care requires listening to others and allowing them to challenge one’s own idea of a good solution.

Children already bring different experiences of responsibility with them. Those who look after younger siblings, support relatives or help out in the neighbourhood may know a great deal about reliability and care. School should notice these experiences and build on them. At the same time, it should create new opportunities to take action: formulating a concern together, questioning a public decision or winning support for a project.

One educational approach to this is service learning. It combines tasks in the community with subject learning and shared reflection. What matters is that those involved work both on the task and on their experiences: What assumptions did we have? Whose view did we overlook? What did our actions achieve? What would we need to change?

There is research evidence on service learning. A 2011 meta-analysis of 62 studies with 11,837 participants found positive effects compared with control groups on attitudes towards oneself and towards learning, civic engagement, social skills and academic performance. Features such as links to classroom teaching, having a say and reflection were associated with better results. This speaks for carefully designed learning opportunities. It is not blanket proof of lasting character development or of the effectiveness of every engagement programme.

Outside schools, too, there are approaches that combine moral questions with joint action. In the Bahá’í-inspired Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Programme, which is open to young people of different religious and non-religious backgrounds, 12- to 15-year-olds meet regularly in small groups. Supported by volunteers, they explore stories and questions of living together and develop projects for their neighbourhood. The approach focuses on the connection between personal development and the contribution young people can make to others.

In Austria, FREI DAY anchors such experiences in the regular timetable. For a whole school year, pupils spend four lessons every week on projects of their own choosing on questions about the future and carry them out at school, in the neighbourhood or in their municipality. Teachers guide pupils rather than direct their work. For 2024, the association FREI DAY Österreich lists 35 pioneering schools of all school types. In Upper Austria there has also been a school network for service learning (Lernen durch Engagement) since 2020, with ten schools and the University College of Teacher Education Upper Austria. The fixed time frame makes engagement part of lessons for all children in a class, instead of leaving it to voluntary extras.

For schools, the challenge is to anchor such experiences in everyday school life. A single project day can be a start. But reliability can only be experienced when a task still exists the following week. Having a say becomes meaningful when children are actually allowed to choose between options and adults are prepared to take their decisions seriously.

This takes more than committed individuals. Schools need time for collaboration, reliable partners and funds that make participation possible regardless of private contributions. Teachers need support in combining subject learning with joint projects. Children must be allowed to make mistakes and to change projects or end them for good reasons. Learning responsibility also means recognising the limits of one’s own actions. Young people should neither replace missing public services nor be made responsible for problems that adults leave to them.

Just as decisive is ordinary everyday school life. How are conflicts dealt with? Who is heard? Do adults explain their decisions and admit their own mistakes? A school that wants to teach justice must be able to put its own rules up for discussion. Character education also happens where children experience how they and others are treated.

AI can help with many of these tasks: finding information, testing ideas or showing alternative solutions. Which needs are taken into account, which goals a group pursues and what its members stand for are things those involved have to settle among themselves. For that, they need knowledge, judgement and the willingness to measure their actions by their consequences.

Educational equity therefore also includes access to experiences in which young people are taken seriously as people who think, decide and contribute. School can create a reliable framework for this. Every child should have the opportunity to understand something together with others, to make a well-founded decision and to experience that their own contribution counts.

Sources and notes

Research on outcomes

Programme descriptions

Reports

  • Escuela N° 25, Villa Futalaufquen: report by Infobae, 23 August 2026 (in Spanish).

Programme descriptions come from the organisations themselves or from practice-oriented publications. They show how a programme is designed; they are not evidence that it works.