We can decide we want to be human

“We can decide we want to be human.” – Miclael Clune (via The Guardian)

The problem is: our education system wasn’t designed for it.

Impact of AI on critical thinking abilities

Everyone is asking whether AI is destroying students’ ability to think.

But what if AI is not breaking the system – but completing it?

Recent accounts from university professors – especially in the Humanities – describe students outsourcing essays, analyses, even interpretations. The concern goes beyond cheating. It feels existential: a loss of critical thinking.

For centuries, schooling has been built on a particular design logic. Analytical thinking helped us break the world down – to find order, isolate causes, produce clarity. Critical thinking deepened that approach: questioning assumptions, weighing evidence, constructing arguments.

Together, they became the gold standard of rational thought – and were built into the bones of education.

We divide knowledge into subjects, units, lessons. We extract ideas from context and emotion. We predefine content. We linearise reasoning. We reward clarity, speed, precision.

Even “critical thinking” often lives inside this same structure – argument without entanglement.

Students are not simply asked to think – but to ‘perform’ thinking in a specific way.

Even for university students who have chosen their field, the choice of subject is not the same as ownership of thinking. Because within that choice, they encounter predefined curricula, standardised forms of expression, implicit rules about what “good thinking” looks like.

Then AI arrives.

And it does precisely what the system has always rewarded: it structures arguments, synthesises sources, produces clean, coherent outputs on demand.

Of course it succeeds.

The response is familiar: more rules, more in-class work, more control. Additive fixes within a system designed to wall life out.

But life keeps finding its way back in. This time in the form of AI.

When we say students are outsourcing thinking, the deeper question is: were we ever creating space for thinking – or just for its performance?

Because real thinking is rarely clean. It is slow, uncertain, relational. It forms through struggle, dialogue, contradiction, lived experience.

The tragedy is not that AI threatens the Humanities. It is that it reveals how far their structure has drifted from what real thinking actually is. Perhaps their role is not to produce better arguments – but to cultivate ways of thinking that cannot be outsourced.

What this moment asks of us is not control – but redesign. Not better policing of thinking – but a rethinking of what human thinking is: situated, relational, evolving, grounded in lived reality.

If we are still to “decide to be human,” then education itself must become more human.

This question sits at the heart of my forthcoming book, Coherence, which asks not how to fix education – but how to redesign the architecture that decides what education can be.