Facing Human Wrongs: Redirecting Education and AI Towards Earth Alignment

Course description

Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming education, often faster than schools, educators, and policy makers can meaningfully respond. While debates tend to polarize between enthusiastic adoption and outright rejection, both positions can obscure a deeper educational challenge: how do we cultivate the discernment needed to navigate technologies that amplify the strengths, contradictions, limitations and harms of the societies that created them?

This eight-week online course invites educators to look beyond AI as merely a tool to be used (or avoided) and instead examine how both contemporary education and generative AI have been shaped by the same historical logics of extraction, optimization, standardization, and control. Rather than treating AI as the source of educational problems, the course explores how AI reproduces and accelerates patterns that education has long normalized, while also creating unprecedented opportunities to rethink what learning, intelligence, relationship, and responsibility might become.

Participants will develop a practical understanding of how generative AI works, how educational systems reproduce particular assumptions about knowledge and success, and how social, ecological, and psychological harms emerge from the interaction of these systems. Throughout the course, participants will cultivate practices of relational discernment that support thoughtful engagement with AI while strengthening the distinctly human capacities that education is uniquely positioned to nurture.

Rather than offering formulas or definitive answers, the course supports participants in developing the capacity to remain present to complexity, uncertainty, ethical tension, and conflicting responsibilities without collapsing into certainty, cynicism, or immobilization.

The course builds on the insight that the deepest educational question raised by AI is not what machines can do, but what forms of human discernment education now needs to cultivate. It encourages participants to embrace moments of not-knowing and to find comfort in the paradoxes and ambiguities that arise, recognizing that these openings can foster humility, deeper inquiry and more genuinely collaborative learning experiences for both educators and students.