As We Celebrate Teachers, AI is Redefining the Classroom
By: Hani Shehada
As the world marks World Teachers' Day on October 5, it is worth reflecting on the profound transformation facing education today. Teachers have long stood as the backbone of learning, guiding generations to think critically, question deeply, and imagine boldly. Yet at the very moment when we should be celebrating their role, a new force – artificial intelligence (AI) – is reshaping not only how we learn, but also what it means to teach and to think.
Artificial intelligence is not knocking politely on the door of higher education; it is kicking it wide open. What we thought would take decades is happening in just a few years. In some cases, in months. Universities that stood for centuries as the ultimate gatekeepers of knowledge are now watching that monopoly evaporate in real time.
Here lies the irony: the very institutions that claim to prepare us for the future are themselves unprepared for the speed at which the future is arriving. And that forces us to ask a deeper question: What were universities for in the first place?
As world leaders, policymakers, and civil society gathered at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York, the role of artificial intelligence in shaping the lives of young people was already on the agenda. Panels such as "Youth and AI: Risks, Opportunities, and Insights from Across the Generational Divide" underscored the urgency of addressing how education systems adapted – or failed to adapt – in the face of this accelerating technological disruption.
Schools exist to provide everyone with a foundation, ensuring that all children, regardless of their background, can read, write, calculate, and understand the basics of history and science. Higher education expands students' minds, allowing them to wrestle with ideas through writing and tackle problems that don't have easy answers.
That muscle is now at risk of atrophy. AI, with its speed and ease of use, is offering answers before students have even considered a problem. It drafts essays in seconds, solves equations instantly, and summarises complex theories in digestible bullet points. What once demanded hours of reading, debate, and intellectual struggle is now a copy-and-paste away. The temptation is irresistible. And yet, the consequence is devastating; the less we use our minds, the less capable they become. The more we trust AI, the more we outsource our own thinking.
I see this tension daily in my work. In refugee camps and fragile states, young people cling to education as their last form of agency. Increasingly, AI is not a distant innovation but sometimes the only teacher available. It is inspiring, opening doors to lectures once out of reach, but also alarming, as it risks replacing the hard intellectual struggle that actually trains the mind to think.
The problem of trust
And even if we accept this trade-off, there is a deeper problem: can we even trust the knowledge AI provides? As someone who reviews student essays and research, I can already see the subtle shifts, sentences polished by machines, arguments that sound plausible but lack depth, citations that evaporate when checked. AI provides confidence without accountability, and this is not a theoretical concern. These systems are already known to hallucinate sources, misrepresent facts, and compress complex ideas into shallow summaries. They are built to provide answers, not to cultivate doubt.
But doubt is the essence of scholarship. If higher education is reduced to feeding prompts and receiving pre-packaged responses, we are not only outsourcing thought, we are reshaping knowledge itself into something narrower, shallower, and more homogenous.
What's at stake
The consequences of AI in higher education extend far beyond university walls. For centuries, universities have been the incubators of society's thinkers, innovators, and leaders. If that incubator is hollowed out, the ripple effects will impact every field: medicine, law, governance, and the arts. Imagine doctors trained to trust algorithms more than their own judgment, judges relying on AI briefs without scrutinising their reasoning, and policymakers unable to see beyond the outputs of opaque systems.
For marginalised youth and refugees, the danger is even greater. On the one hand, AI promises unprecedented access to world-class education without borders or visa requirements. On the other, it risks trapping them within knowledge systems not built for them, frameworks that erase their languages, histories, and perspectives. I have sat with scholarship students in Gaza, Afghanistan, and refugee communities across the Middle East who dream of becoming doctors, lawyers, and teachers. For them, higher education is not an abstract aspiration; it is a matter of survival and dignity. Yet if AI continues to be trained on data that excludes their voices, the knowledge they receive will always be someone else's version of the truth. That is the new face of exclusion, subtle, invisible, and harder to confront than a locked classroom door.
The role of institutions
Universities must reclaim their purpose, not as dispensers of information, but as cultivators of intellect. They must shift away from assignments that AI can mimic and toward experiences that AI cannot, such as oral defenses, collaborative projects, fieldwork, laboratories, artistic creation, and, above all, the practice of judgment. Exams should measure reasoning, not regurgitation. Essays should test synthesis, not summary. Lecturers must teach students to validate information, to challenge sources, and to recognise when a text is biased or incomplete.
The future we choose
AI will not wait for us. It is moving faster than reform, faster even than our ability to grasp its consequences. The real question is not whether AI will change higher education; it already has. But the question is whether we let it hollow out its meaning or harness it to deepen what education is truly for: developing minds, not just delivering answers.
As an educator and a parent, I ask myself daily, what kind of minds are we raising? Machines will continue to get smarter, that is certain. Our task is to keep young people sharp enough to ask the questions machines cannot. If we fail, we risk surrendering not just our universities, but the very essence of what it means to be human.
Disclaimer: The author first published this story in October 2025 on CGTN website. Click here to read the original post.
