Source: in-cyprus.philenews.com
People have always been better at inventing new things than using them wisely
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education at a breathtaking pace, offering unprecedented opportunities for personalised learning. Yet as AI reshapes how students learn and teachers teach, it also presents profound challenges and ethical dilemmas that education systems must urgently address.
The question, Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD and architect of PISA, told Phileleftheros in an interview, is whether AI will empower us or diminish us. “Will AI make us cognitively and emotionally immature, slaves to algorithms, or will it empower us to make ethical decisions, collaborate better and be less prejudiced? AI is not a magic force but an incredible accelerator. It can empower educators to understand how students with different individual and social characteristics learn, or it can turn them into slaves of prefabricated lesson plans,” he said.
The stakes extend beyond the classroom. In a world where AI steadily erodes the boundaries of time, cost and space in education, young people need more than knowledge—they need to discover their purpose, develop their talents, and understand where they want to make a difference. “The past was about teaching students answers; the future will be about helping them formulate better questions, challenge what we took for granted, evolve from solving problems to identifying them,” Schleicher explained.
For Cyprus, the challenges are particularly acute. Students perform well at reproducing what they have learnt, but struggle when asked to extrapolate from their knowledge and apply it creatively in new situations. “There are many factors at play here, but one that is often overlooked is that students in Cyprus are good at reproducing what they have learnt, but struggle when asked to use their knowledge creatively in novel situations,” he noted, adding that this points to the need for a fundamental shift in the educational paradigm.
What do you think is the role of education today? How has this role changed in an era defined by rapid technological transformation?
Perhaps the most important role of education today is to help young people find out why they are here on this planet, what is important to them, and where they want to make a difference. Education also needs to help them discover and develop their talents, with educators who are not just great instructors but also great coaches, great facilitators, and creative designers of innovative learning environments. But what makes people happy is not just their passion but to make a difference to the people around them, so education needs to help learners better understand what the world needs from them, and to transform skills into better jobs and better lives.
In short, I believe success in education today is about building curiosity – opening minds, it is about compassion – opening hearts, and it is about courage, mobilising our cognitive, social and emotional resources to take action. And those are also our best weapon against the biggest threats of our times – ignorance – the closed mind; hate – the closed heart; and fear – the enemy of agency.
Do you believe AI will fundamentally change how students learn and how teachers teach? Which way?
Yes, absolutely, AI is transforming education at a breathtaking pace. Its most visible benefit? Personalisation—at a scale we have never known. While you study mathematics, AI is studying you, how you learn, where you advance and where you get stuck, where your curiosity lights up and where you get bored. And then, like a great tailor, it stitches together a learning experience that fits you—not the average student, not the textbook student—you. AI-powered learning games make learning fun. AI-based simulations let you do things that are difficult or costly to do in the real world. Why ask a student to sit listening to the results of a scientific experiment when they can run that experiment in a virtual lab—safely and creatively? And powerful learning analytics help students learn better, teachers teach better and schools to become more effective. The old boundaries of time, cost, and space are melting away.
But AI is not a magic force. It’s more like an amazing accelerator and an incredible amplifier: It will amplify good ideas and good educational practice in the same way it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice.
AI can be the great equalizer, helping us power classrooms where every student—no matter their needs or background—has a real chance to succeed. Or it can become the great divider, supercharging privilege.
AI can accelerate student learning or mislead students to outsource their thinking.
AI can empower teachers to become creative designers of innovative learning experiences. Or it can disempower them to become slaves of scripted lessons plans.
AI can help us reduce bias through better data. Or it can calcify bias and encode it into systems we don’t understand.
AI can connect a child in Nicosia to a child in Naple or Nairobi. Or it can silo us in echo chambers where we only hear our own thoughts shouted back louder.
AI is ethically neutral, but it is always in the hands of teachers who are not neutral.
Where this ends up is in our hands, that is, whether AI becomes a ladder for opportunity or a trapdoor of inequality.
Are you concerned that research shows that critical thinking is declining and that AI is limiting the way we think?
Yes, humans have always been better to invent new things than to use them wisely. Our PISA data show that more time on devices doesn’t automatically translate into better learning. We’ve learned the hard way that powerful tools in unprepared hands don’t create powerful outcomes.
In Türkiye, when students used ChatGPT to write an essay, their essays improved. But when afterwards they had to write without AI, they scored worse than peers who had not used AI. China found the same pattern. In a U.S. study, 80% of students who used an LLM to write, couldn’t remember what they had written—compared to just 10% of those who used just their brains. So the risk is real: If students outsource thinking, they lose understanding.
But here’s a hopeful twist. When experienced teachers used AI tutoring support, they saw small gains. You see that on the right side. But when less experienced teachers used the same tools, here on the left side, the gains were enormous. AI helped weaker teachers teach more like good teachers—prompting students to explain their reasoning, asking questions instead of giving answers,
nudging learners into deeper thought. In other words, AI didn’t just make students smarter—it made teaching smarter.
Do you agree that there is a growing gap between young people’s education and the jobs available to them? What changes should the education system make to better align with labor market needs?
It will become harder and harder to anticipate the evolution of labour demand and to make education systems aligned with skill needs. We therefore need to change our approach. The past was about teaching students answers, the future will be about helping them iterate to better questions, putting into question what we took for granted, to advance from problem-solvers to become problem finders, to attend to purpose rather than just complete tasks, and to embrace the new and uncertain rather than sticking to known plans. Whenever students feel that questions lead to trouble rather than to answers, something fundamentally is wrong with education. In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we test their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators.
At work, at home and in the community, tomorrow’s students will need a broad understanding of how others live, in different cultures and traditions, and how others think, whether as scientists or as artists. The foundations for this don’t come naturally. We are all born with a sense of belonging to our family or to people with shared experiences. But it requires good education to create the capacity to relate to people who are different from us, and to increase our radius of trust to strangers.
In tomorrows world, students need to recognise interconnections, navigate ambiguity, reconcile tensions between competing demands – equity and freedom, autonomy and community, innovation and continuity, efficiency and democratic process.
These days it is tempting to see artificial intelligence as a force that steadily erodes human agency. But this should not be a slow retreat – us yielding more and more ground to algorithms. Education can help us become so much more than the sum of isolated, automatable tasks.
The rise of AI should sharpen our focus on human capabilities that cannot be reduced to code – our consciousness, our capacity to navigate complex relationships, to exercise ethical judgment in uncertainty, to create something genuinely new.
These are not are not just beautiful words or diplomatic ornaments, they are what education is all about, and they are the pillars on which we build our societies.
And if education doesn’t protect these human capabilities with determination, AI could wash away the very foundations of our societies.
PISA results often spark strong reactions. What lessons can we learn from top-performing countries?
The most powerful lesson is to look at these countries and study how these countries have got to where they are today, and how they see the future of education today.
The first thing I learned is that the leaders in high-performing education systems have convinced their citizens to value the future. Chinese parents and grandparents will invest their last money into their future, the education of their children. In Europe we have already spent the money of our children for our own consumption.
But valuing education highly is just part of the equation. Another part is the deep belief that every student can learn. In some countries, students are segregated into different tracks at early ages, reflecting the notion that only some children can succeed. By contrast, in countries like Estonia, Canada, Finland or Japan, parents and teachers trust that all students can meet high standards, and that trust is manifested in student and teacher behaviour. These systems have advanced from sorting human talent to developing human talent. They realise that ordinary students can have extraordinary talents.
And nowhere does the quality of a school system exceed the quality of its teachers. Top school systems select and educate their teaching staff carefully. And they provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice, and they encourage teachers to grow in their careers.
Top-performing school systems have moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of work organisation. They encourage their teachers to be innovative, to improve their own performance and that of their colleagues, and to pursue professional development that leads to better practice. In top school systems, the emphasis is not on looking upwards within the administration of the school system. Instead it’s about looking outwards to the next teacher or the next school, creating a culture of collaboration and strong networks of innovation.
And the best-performing school systems provide high-quality education across the entire system so that every student benefits from excellent teaching. To achieve this, these countries attract the strongest principals to the toughest schools and the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms.
Can you assess why Cyprus scores low in the PISA results? What are your recommendations to improve the situation?
There are many factors at play here, but one that is often overlooked is that students in Cyprus are good at reproducing what they have learned, but struggle when asked to extrapolate from what they know and use their knowledge creatively in novel situations. Again, this points to the need to shift the educational paradigm.