AI and Critical Thinking in Education

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How do we conceive of AI and critical thinking in education? Increasingly, schools are importing the new technology to help reduce teacher burnout and tailor lessons to individual student needs. According to School AI¹, 37% of teachers are now using AI to create lessons, reducing their workload. As a Waldorf teacher, I highly support individual student success and teacher well-being. However, the use of AI in education leads to another question on behalf of both teachers and students. If we ask AI to do our thinking, what will the long-term result be?

How AI is Being Used by Students

Imagine a student in a Roman History block assigned to write an essay explaining why Brutus killed Julius Caesar. She has been told she is not allowed to have AI write her essay for her. This pupil is generally responsible and would never do such a thing, anyway. Instead, she’s just going to get some ideas from ChatGPT. She types in, “Tell me why Brutus wanted to kill Caesar.” The machine spits out a list of five points including:

• The Fear of Tyranny
• Duty to Rome over personal loyalty
• Family legacy and pressure
• Influence of other conspirators
• A tragic miscalculation

Under each heading, it lists several reasons why it thinks that way. Satisfied with the answer, she goes and writes her essay in her own words. That’s okay, right?

Cognitive Offloading

In the aforementioned scenario, the student may practice rendering someone else’s thoughts (or in this case, the machine’s) in her own words, but she’s not fully exercising her critical thinking and research skills. We call this “cognitive offloading” because she is offloading her need to cognize the whole situation around Caesar’s assassination. She’s asking a machine to perform an essentially human function. According to this article from AWSNA², cognitive offloading makes people more dependent on AI and decreases their will to solve problems and generate their own understanding of the world’s phenomena.

Scenarios like this force us to reflect on who we truly are and what we wish the human race to become in the future. When we consider AI and critical thinking in education, we may even say the greatest blessing is that it makes us face this question.

Benefits and Drawbacks of AI in Education

I would argue humans have been losing our capacity to think critically and freely for decades due to how we’ve been educating our young. From the advent of the Industrial Revolution, education has shifted from a process of fostering the soul to conditioning people to become good workers in mechanistic systems. Modern public education is now highly industrialized. It follows an industrial schedule (8am-3pm, which I argue is too long for most children), uses a standardized curriculum tailored towards standardized tests, and it medicates children that don’t fit the mold. Is it possible AI is exacerbating these problems, even as it purports to solve them?

Time will tell. For the moment, however, need it all be bad? If you use Google today, its Gemini AI will often deliver the first answer that pops up. Imagine again our student above. Instead of asking, “Tell me why Brutus wanted to kill Caesar,” she asks, “Give me Plutarch quotes that explain Brutus’s motivation in assassinating Caesar.” Instead of analysis, the machine produces facts related to her question. AI becomes a glorified search engine or, we may say, a highly efficient librarian. It shortens what might have taken hours into seconds.

I’m not suggesting we never take our children to the library. In general, I think students K-12 should be prohibited from using AI to complete schoolwork so they can fully develop their human capacities. It is good for them to find physical books, read them, and take notes. Such things develop the will so it doesn’t atrophy like a withered rose in the desert. It’s just like calculators and math. Just because they can do arithmetic way faster than human brains, should we excuse our children from doing mental math daily? I hope that’s a rhetorical question. I am, however, saying when it comes to AI and critical thinking, especially in education, one can theoretically use it in ways that still require their own mind to put the pieces together. One can use AI without outsourcing one’s thinking to it.

Should We be Worried About the Future

No. We should be intentional about it. The causal forces in the world are constantly throwing curveballs at humans. I don’t think we should be anti-curveball. Rather, I think we should learn to hit the curveballs instead of letting them hit us. I predict humanity will split into two kinds of people in the future. One, the so-called “superhumans,” will retain their freedom of thought. They won’t outsource it to technology, even if they use technology’s research and fact-finding power to more freely think. This is what I call the “path of effort.” These people will live with a growth mindset and be willing to expend the effort to become fully human.

I call them “superhumans” because they may appear as such in contrast to those who choose the other path, the “automatons.” They will become more like the machines they outsource their intelligence to. I call this the “path of laziness,” and I think these folks will lose their ability to think freely. They will also become much easier to manipulate by those forces wishing to dominate them.

One of these paths has a human future and the other does not. I guess it’s up to each individual to decide. Considering human freedom begins with how we raise our children, understanding the place of AI and critical thinking in education is a good place to start.

How We Can Help

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References:

1. Morton, J. (2026, January 9) A complete lesson planning guide for teachers. School AI. https://schoolai.com/blog/ai-lesson-planning-guide-teachers
2. AWSNA (2026, January 12). Rooted Before Wired: Educating Children for an AI Future. Essentials in Education. https://www.waldorfeducation.org/rooted-before-wired-educating-children-for-an-ai-future/