The current conversation around AI in education follows a predictable pattern. Software vendors showcase how their latest tools can automate grading, generate lesson plans, or produce personalised learning pathways. Administrators eye potential cost savings and efficiency gains. Meanwhile, educators worry about academic integrity, job security, and the dehumanisation of education.
What’s striking about these conversations is not their content but their focus: they’re overwhelmingly centred on teaching and assessment, rather than learning. We’re overly concerned with how AI can help teachers teach more efficiently, or on how we might protect the existing assessment infrastructure, rather than how it might transform students’ learning.
I suppose this isn’t surprising. Our education systems have always privileged teaching over learning, assuming that effective teaching automatically produces learning. But anyone who has taught knows this relationship is far more complex. Students don’t learn simply because we teach; they learn when they actively engage with ideas in ways that are meaningful to them (I’ve shared some ideas about the decoupling of learning and teaching before).
For me, the more interesting question isn’t whether AI can make teaching more efficient, but whether it might create entirely new possibilities for learning. What if, instead of using AI to automate traditional teaching tasks, we reimagined it as a participant in rich learning ecologies? What if we saw it not as a replacement for human educators but as a tool that could help students connect with ideas, resources, and each other in ways previously impossible?
This shifts our focus from AI’s impact on teaching workflows to its potential to transform learning experiences. It raises questions about how AI might help learners navigate information abundance, engage with diverse perspectives, visualise complex systems, or explore ideas through multiple representations. It doesn’t ask how AI can make teaching more efficient but how it might make learning more profound.
The current conversation around AI in education reflects a deeper issue in the education landscape: our tendency to organise our systems around teaching instead of learning. Generative AI doesn’t only offer new tools for teaching, but also an opportunity to rethink the relationship between teaching and learning—and, maybe, to create educational experiences better suited to the challenges of our time.