Will AI make education more educational?

This article is authored by Rajeev Parashar and Parul Gupta.

India’s education debate is traditionally framed around access, infrastructure, teacher shortages, or exam pressure. However, artificial intelligence is now forcing a different and far more uncomfortable question to the surface: what exactly is education for? For years, much of the Indian education system has drifted towards credential production rather than actual learning. Recent national-level assessments such as PARAKH show that a large share of Indian children in middle school lack skills in basic reading, arithmetic and comprehension. Yet students continue moving through the conveyor belt of the system, collecting marks and certificates. The signal sent from an early age is that credentials matter more than capability.

AI (REUTERS)

Once education becomes primarily about accumulating external markers, a predictable and transactional ecosystem emerges. Coaching centres flourish, model answers become the ultimate currency, assignments are routinely outsourced, and rote-learning is consistently rewarded over genuine understanding. In this environment, the ideal student is no longer the most curious learner, but rather the one who is most efficient at navigating and gaming the evaluation system. Artificial intelligence is about to completely disrupt this fragile equilibrium.

Much of the current panic around AI in education assumes that students using tools like ChatGPT for assignments are simply cheating. While that is certainly true for students smuggling phones into exam halls, it assumes the assignments being replaced had genuine educational value to begin with. In reality, a large amount of take-home academic work had become ritualistic long before AI arrived. Whether copying from guidebooks, borrowing seniors’ assignments, hiring ghostwriters, or copy-pasting projects from the internet, many students have always been looking for shortcuts. AI has simply industrialised a practice that was already happening informally, exposing an extant truth rather than creating a new problem.

Furthermore, AI is democratising access to forms of academic assistance that were once exclusively class privileges. Wealthier students have always had the financial resources to pay for private tutors, external editors, or professionally prepared assignments. Students from less privileged backgrounds did not. AI dramatically reduces that equity gap. A student with a smartphone now has access to explanatory tools, writing assistance, language correction, and simulated tutoring that previously required significant financial and social capital. While this does not mean all uses of AI are desirable, it does mean the traditional moral distinction between authentic work and assisted work was always far blurrier than institutions care to admit.

Ultimately, the real consequence of AI is that it makes the traditional template of education increasingly unsustainable. If an essay can be generated in seconds, assigning generic essays no longer measures learning. If answers can be produced instantly, examinations based on predictable reproduction lose all meaning. As students outsource routine cognitive tasks to machines, institutions are forced to rethink what skills they are actually imparting and evaluating.

Paradoxically, this tectonic shift may finally make education more educational. Teachers will no longer be able to rely on standardised notes and evaluate assignments recycled year after year. Instead, assessment will have to become supervised, interactive, analytical, and idiosyncratic. A teacher who truly wants to know whether a student understands a concept will need to ask follow-up questions in person, probe their reasoning process, and evaluate application rather than reproduction.

This is not an entirely new philosophy. The best educators have always known that genuine learning reveals itself in conversation, improvisation, and independent reasoning rather than polished submissions. A student who truly understands a concept can defend it, apply it to unfamiliar situations, and explain it in their own words. Consequently, physical classrooms may become more important in the AI era, not less. Educators who merely distribute notes and grade formulaic assignments will lose relevance overnight, while those who create environments for discussion, questioning, mentorship, and supervised intellectual engagement will become invaluable.

The implications of this shift extend far beyond pedagogy to the core of the economy. India’s obsession with degrees has long distorted both education and labour markets. Employers frequently use degrees and diplomas as crude screening devices because they cannot directly observe competence, driving students to chase credentials, which in turn forces universities to optimise for degree delivery over actual learning. AI weakens this arrangement because it completely separates visible output from underlying skill. A beautifully written assignment or a flawless coding submission is no longer proof of a student's personal capability. This reality will inevitably push employers and institutions toward direct, real-time evaluations of competence.

This transition will be incredibly uncomfortable. Many existing methods of teaching and assessment will become obsolete faster than institutions can adapt, leading to inevitable confusion, resistance, and misuse. Many students will over-depend on AI, inadvertently weakening their own critical thinking abilities, while some institutions will respond with surveillance-heavy approaches that breed distrust without solving the root problem.

When information is universally accessible and generic output is easy to automate, the value of education shifts entirely to what machines cannot replicate: Judgment, originality, interpretation, interpersonal engagement, and genuine understanding. The great irony is that AI may succeed where decades of traditional educational reform have struggled, by forcing schools and universities to rediscover the difference between producing certificates and producing educated people.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Rajeev Parashar, research scholar, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (Delhi NCR) and Parul Gupta, assistant professor, Dhirubhai Ambani University (Gujarat).