Why read a book if artificial intelligence can summarize it in seconds? Why write an essay if a machine can produce a correct text? Why learn to analyze an image, a poem, or a piece of music if we can ask for an instant explanation?
The question seems reasonable only if we believe that the value of education lies in the final product. If reading serves only to obtain information, if writing serves only to produce a text, if analyzing serves only to reach a conclusion, then any tool capable of producing that result faster will seem to render the process unnecessary.
But that is too narrow an understanding of education. Many of the most important things we learn are not found solely in the result. They are found in what happens within us as we strive to reach it.
We have cars, elevators, escalators, and apps that reduce the need to walk. From a strictly functional standpoint, we need to walk less than before. And yet, many people go to the gym to walk or run on a treadmill. No one does it to get somewhere. They do it because the body needs the exercise.
Something similar happens with reading, writing, acting, drawing, or playing an instrument. If the sole objective were to produce a summary, a response, an image, or a text, a machine could often do so effectively. But if the objective is to train attention, language, judgment, sensitivity, memory, and imagination, then the process is not an obstacle. It is precisely the point.
Artificial intelligence makes this discussion more urgent, but it should not make it more defensive. It would be absurd to deny the potential of these tools. In a 2023 study, Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang of MIT found that using ChatGPT reduced the time needed to complete a set of professional writing tasks by 40% and increased output quality, as assessed by independent evaluators, by 18%. The finding does not call for panic. It calls for better thinking about what education is meant to develop in the first place.
If a technology can help us write, translate, summarize, program, explore ideas, or reduce mechanical tasks, the question is not whether we should use it. The question is what human capabilities we need to cultivate in order to use it well.
Moreover, we are facing a pivotal generation. Those who teach today, who research, lead institutions, or make decisions about this transition were largely educated before the advent of generative artificial intelligence. This does not mean their mental habits are necessarily better, but rather that they were born under different conditions: writing, searching, reading, and analyzing required a different kind of effort. The new generations will grow up with AI as a natural part of their environment, not as a tool added partway through. Their foundations will be neither worse nor better; they will be different.
And that difference makes the task more difficult. It is not a matter of imposing on the new generations the way we learned—those of us who knew a world before these tools. Nor is it a matter of assuming that any friction that can be eliminated must disappear. The challenge is to distinguish which tasks should be delegated, which processes can be enriched by technology, and which exercises remain necessary to cultivate attention, judgment, sensitivity, and imagination.
Therein lies the difference between delegating a task and abandoning an exercise.
A machine can write for me, but it cannot do for me the inner work that takes place when I write: organizing an intuition, finding a voice, discovering a contradiction, refining an idea. A machine can summarize a novel, but it cannot live for me the experience of inhabiting its rhythm, its ambiguity, its silences. A machine can describe a painting, but it cannot replace the education of the gaze that occurs when a person pauses before it.
The issue, therefore, is not to advocate for a less technological education. It is to advocate for an education that is more conscious of what it shapes.
The deepest pleasures usually require initiation.
Here, the arts and humanities play a decisive role. Not because they are a nostalgic refuge from change, but because they cultivate some of the most essential skills in a world accelerated by technology: analytical thinking, creativity, communication, listening, interpretation, empathy, judgment, and adaptability.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 notes that analytical thinking remains the core skill most in demand by employers, considered essential by seven out of ten companies surveyed. It is followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness.
That list matters because it clears up a misunderstanding. We are not talking about cultural frills or a refined form of leisure. We are talking about professional and civic skills. Deep reading, reflective writing, artistic interpretation, philosophical conversation, or historical analysis are not separate from the world of work or public life. They are practices that shape precisely many of the skills we say we value today.
Montaigne preferred a “well-made” mind to a “well-filled” one. The distinction remains useful. It is not a matter of disparaging accumulated knowledge, but of remembering that education consists not only of incorporating information, but of developing the ability to use it judiciously.
That is why we should refine, not abandon, our educational language. Talking about competencies, outcomes, and indicators is necessary. Assessment matters. Measurement can help. Producing good results is not irrelevant. But competencies do not appear by decree, nor do they take root simply because someone delivers a final product. They are formed through repeated, demanding, and meaningful practices.
Creativity is cultivated by exposing oneself to forms, languages, materials, constraints, and problems. Critical thinking is trained by comparing sources, distinguishing an opinion from an argument, learning to detect an omission, and tolerating the discomfort of a difficult question. Communication is developed through reading, writing, listening, rephrasing, and interpreting the effect our words have on others. In that sense, the arts and humanities do not contradict competency-based education. They deepen it.
They are, first and foremost, a place of enjoyment. Reading a novel, listening to music, looking at a painting, writing, dancing, acting, or visiting a museum are not activities that must always be justified by their immediate utility. They offer us beauty, pleasure, comfort, intensity, play, and memory. They educate the senses. They expand the experience of being alive.
But they are also training. Reading a long novel exercises attention. Interpreting a poem teaches us to live with ambiguity. Studying history forces us to look beyond the immediate present. Philosophy distinguishes an opinion from an argument. Literature broadens the moral imagination. Music educates the ear. The visual arts sharpen perception. Writing organizes thought. A work of art does not merely give us something to look at. It also does something to us.
This does not mean idealizing effort for its own sake. Life demands effort, and we should not hide that fact. Learning requires patience, discipline, and a certain degree of discomfort. But we have too often presented culture, reading, and thinking as a harsh, almost punitive obligation. As if the humanities could only defend themselves through duty: one must read, one must know, one must study, one must strive. Perhaps we need to rediscover another path: seduction.
It is not enough to say that reading is important. We must help people discover that reading can be enjoyable. We must show that art can touch a person’s everyday life. That does not mean succumbing to a hedonistic culture where only what is easy or immediately pleasurable matters. On the contrary. The deepest pleasures usually require initiation. Those who learn to listen more closely to a piece of music do not diminish the pleasure; they multiply it. Those who learn to read better do not turn reading into a technical obligation; they discover more layers of enjoyment. Those who paint, sing, act, or write do not eliminate the difficulty; they learn to navigate it with purpose.
Here, too, the dimension of well-being comes into play, but understood not as mere leisure, but as part of a fuller personal, professional, and civic life. Creative practices help shape experience, regulate attention, give form to complex emotions, and rebuild purpose. A World Health Organization review on arts and health synthesized evidence from over 3,000 studies and highlighted the role of the arts in prevention, health promotion, and the management of various conditions throughout life.
This does not mean that art is a magic cure, nor that reading a poem can replace public policy, therapy, or medicine. It means something more concrete: that creating, reading, singing, painting, writing, or contemplating can help us name what we experience, make sense of what we feel, and relate better to ourselves and others.
That well-being is not separate from work or citizenship. A person with greater capacity for attention, expression, listening, imagination, and meaning does not just live better. They also collaborate better, lead better, make better decisions, and participate more fully in communal life. The arts and humanities do not separate us from the professional world: they can make us better able to inhabit it without reducing us to mechanical productivity.
That is why the conversation about artificial intelligence should not be limited to which tasks will be automated. It should also ask what human capacities we want to strengthen in an era when many tasks can be performed with the help of machines. The answer cannot be purely technical. We need more digital literacy, without a doubt. But we also need more interpretive, aesthetic, ethical, and emotional literacy.
We can use artificial intelligence to write better and, at the same time, continue to teach why writing matters. We can use it to summarize a book and, at the same time, champion the experience of reading it. We can use it to generate images and, at the same time, value what happens when a person draws, looks, corrects, fails, and tries again. We can automate tasks without automating our inner lives.
The mistake would be to confuse efficiency with education. Just because something can be done faster doesn’t mean we always learn more by doing it faster. Just because a tool produces a good result doesn’t mean the process has lost its value. And just because a machine can assist us doesn’t mean we should give up the exercises that give us judgment, sensitivity, and purpose.
The great opportunity of our time does not lie in choosing between technology and humanity. It lies in combining them intelligently. Using increasingly powerful tools to produce better results, yes, but also to demand a richer education from ourselves: more attention, more discernment, more creativity, more sensitivity, more capacity for meaning.
Artificial intelligence can help us do many things. Some, better than we can. But it cannot do for us what shapes us as we do it.
That should be one of the great educational goals of our time: to harness technology without ceasing to exercise our humanity.
© IE Insights.
