School between Memory, Method, and Artificial Intelligence
A dialogue on the purpose of education, the teacher, the pupil, content, method, the smartphone, and artificial intelligence.
This essay-dialogue begins with a question that has followed me for a long time: what is school still good for in a world in which information seems to be everywhere, and technology promises to answer any question instantly?
I do not look at school from the outside. I was a pupil in a still disciplinary school, a student in a polytechnic institute undergoing transformation, a professor in a rigid university system, and later a witness to the passage toward computerization, the internet, and artificial intelligence. For that reason, the question is not only pedagogical. It is also autobiographical.
Complementary essay: Today, Myself, and Technology
An uncomfortable question: what is school still good for?
The question may seem brutal, but it is by no means useless. In a world in which a child can find more information on the internet than an entire high-school library contained in my childhood, in which a student can ask an artificial intelligence to summarize a course, write a program, or explain a theorem, school risks appearing as a slow, cumbersome, almost anachronistic institution.
Tell me, I ask you directly: what is school still good for today? I am not referring to school as an administration, with curricula, exams, grade books, and diplomas. I am asking what its deeper purpose is. Why? For what? For whom? With whom? What exactly must be transmitted, and how?
School cannot be reduced to the transmission of information. If that were its only purpose, it would already have been surpassed by libraries, by the internet, and more recently by systems of artificial intelligence. Its purpose is more complex: to form people capable of understanding, judging, expressing themselves, cooperating, disciplining their attention, and assuming their place in society.
The answer seems correct to me, but incomplete. For school never forms an abstract human being. It forms children, adolescents, students, adults, or even people who have reached the age of withdrawal from professional life. There is no such thing as “the pupil” in general, just as there is no such thing as “the teacher” in general. There is always a particular person, in a particular age, facing a particular content and a particular method.
Between family and society
Education begins before school. It begins in the family, in gestures, in language, in prohibitions, in the first approvals and the first refusals. The child learns before knowing that he is learning. He learns the tone of the voice, the rules of the house, the permitted space and the forbidden space, trust or fear.
School therefore appears as a passage. It does not start from zero. It receives a child already partly formed, with habits, fears, curiosities, spoiling, and blockages. At the same time, it must prepare him for a world that is no longer the family.
Exactly. School is an intermediary institution. It takes the child out of the affective universe of the family and introduces him into a regulated space, where there are common rules, impersonal authority, classmates, competition, cooperation, criteria of evaluation, and objectives that no longer belong only to the family.
This function of passage is perhaps more important today than ever. Families are more fragile, more mobile, more fragmented. The child comes into contact very early with screens, images, games, languages, and temptations that are no longer filtered by the family. Media imposes itself as another partner in education. School no longer receives only the child of the family, but the child of a digital world that has already entered his room.
The pyramid of the dilemma: for whom, what, who, how?
In an older text on education, I had formulated the problem in an almost engineering form. Any educational system must simultaneously answer a few simple questions:
- For whom? — who are those who must be educated?
- What? — what content must be transmitted?
- Who? — who has the right and the capacity to teach?
- How? — through what methods does learning take place?
I then called them, in my mind, “the pyramid of the dilemma.” At its base are the pupil, the content, and the teacher. At the top is pedagogy, that is, the concrete mode, the method, through which learning takes place. Any reform that changes only textbooks, only exams, only the duration of school cycles, or only teachers’ salaries, without reanalyzing the whole ensemble, risks remaining a mere coat of paint.
This scheme remains current. If the pupil changes, the method must change. If the content changes, the teacher’s preparation must change. If technology changes, evaluation must be rethought. And if all these change at the same time, a superficial reform is no longer sufficient.
To complete the scheme, you could add a brief mention of the “evaluation system.” In the era of artificial intelligence, what changes is not only how we teach, but also how we verify whether learning has occurred. When AI can generate a polished essay or flawless code, the traditional examination based on “homework” dies. Evaluation must also become Socratic: oral defense of arguments, explanation of the process, not merely the presentation of the final product.
This is precisely where the difficulty lies. Today’s school is changing under the simultaneous pressure of demography, the economy, technology, migration, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. Yet it often continues to work with forms inherited from past centuries: the classroom, the lesson hour, the grade book, the blackboard, the examination, the diploma.
For whom? The pupil, the student, the adult, the old person
The first question is perhaps the most difficult: for whom does school function? The traditional answer was simple: for children and young people. But such a limitation is no longer sufficient.
Today education cannot stop at the end of high school or university. Professions change, technologies change, languages change. A person may be forced to retrain several times in a single lifetime. And in old age, if he does not learn to remain in contact with the world and its problems, he risks being excluded not only professionally, but also socially.
This means that education must be conceived as a continuous process. Kindergarten, primary school, high school, university, the doctorate, professional training, and learning in the third age are not separate worlds, but stages of a continuity. They have different emphases, but they belong to the same need: the need to remain capable of understanding the world in which one lives.
Here lies one of the great challenges of our age. School can no longer be only an institution of the beginning of life. It must become an infrastructure of the whole of life. Contemporary human beings can no longer live only on the capital of knowledge accumulated in youth. This capital devalues quickly. What remains important is not only what you have learned, but the capacity to continue learning.
What should be taught?
The question “what should be taught?” has become dramatic. Knowledge has diversified enormously. Every discipline branches out, deepens, and multiplies its instruments. No school program can contain everything. At the same time, utilitarian pressure has increased. School is asked to produce “employable” people quickly. Some subjects must disappear or be drastically reduced. Which of them should disappear, and at what risk?
In computer science I saw this phenomenon very clearly. A young person can be trained quickly to work in a programming language or in a particular technological framework. But if he does not understand principles, data structures, algorithms, architecture, and modeling, he will become a prisoner of the technology he has learned. When it becomes obsolete, he will be blocked.
This is the tension between utilitarian instruction and fundamental formation. The first answers an immediate need. The second builds the capacity for adaptation. A school dominated exclusively by utility produces executants. A school dominated exclusively by abstraction may produce people cut off from reality. The balance is difficult.
I would put it this way: school must transmit not only information, but structures based on relations between components. Not only answers, but well-posed questions. Not only procedures, but criteria. Not only professional skills, but the capacity to understand why a procedure works, when it no longer works, and how it can be replaced.
General culture is not an ornament. It is the human being’s reserve of meaning. Without it, specialization becomes narrow, and technical competence may become blind. In a world in which technology becomes politics, economy, weapon, administration, and instrument of influence, school must form not only professionals, but citizens capable of ethical judgment.
Who can be a teacher?
We all keep the memory of good teachers and weak teachers. But this judgment is often subjective. A teacher seems good to us when he opened a door for us, when he made us understand something, when he respected our intelligence or awakened our curiosity. A teacher seems weak when he bored us, humiliated us, or closed our access to a discipline.
I have known highly competent professors who were incapable of teaching. And I have known people who, without being geniuses of their field, had the rare gift of making the discipline intelligible. That is why I do not believe that the specialist is automatically a teacher. The teacher must also be a pedagogue. Perhaps it is too much to ask him to be charismatic as well, but his personality matters.
The good teacher is not merely a repository of knowledge. He is a mediator between the discipline and the one who learns. He must understand not only the subject, but also the difficulty of the person who encounters it for the first time. In this sense, pedagogical empathy is essential: the capacity to understand how the other understands.
This formulation seems decisive to me: the teacher must understand how the pupil understands. It is not enough to explain from his own point of view. He must be able to descend into the labyrinth in which the learner finds himself, to see where he stumbles, what false assumption he makes, what word he does not understand, what step is missing.
The teacher of tomorrow will perhaps be less an orator at the lectern and more an architect of learning: he will organize contexts, indicate paths, correct deviations, recommend sources, require effort, and verify understanding. But if he loses his intellectual and moral authority, he will no longer be a teacher, but only an animator of content.
How does one learn?
Learning is not the simple exposure to information. If it were, contemporary human beings would be the most educated in history. But it is by no means certain that this is the case. The abundance of information can also produce confusion, superficiality, haste, and the illusion of competence.
This is where the digital age worries me most. When the answer is immediate, the effort of constructing it seems useless. The pupil searches, copies, combines, delivers. But the question remains: has he learned anything?
School must defend effort. Not mechanical, useless, humiliating effort, but fertile effort: the patience to read, calculate, write, return, make mistakes, and correct them. A school that completely eliminates effort under the pretext of attractiveness risks producing fragile people, incapable of carrying an intellectual construction through to the end.
For example, many years ago it was decided that pupils should no longer be required to memorize poems or texts by heart. It was, of course, a relief for everyone. But was it also a good measure? The exercise of memory remains necessary into old age, and the unexpected encounter between a moment of life and a text preserved somewhere in memory can bring unsuspected satisfactions.
To learn means to modify an internal structure. It is not enough to access an answer on the internet. One must understand it, integrate it, be able to reconstruct it, apply it, criticize it, and transfer it to another context. In the absence of this process, information remains external to the one who uses it.
As for the exercise of memory, the solution would not, I think, be a return to the old practice of obligatory and quantitative memorization, when the pupil had to reproduce whole texts without truly understanding them. But neither does the complete renunciation of memory exercise seem to me a good solution. School should preserve memorization as a form of internalization, not as a simple test of discipline. The pupil could be encouraged to learn selected fragments, short poems, significant passages, formulas, definitions, or texts with expressive value, but always accompanied by explanation, discussion, and personal appropriation.
Memory must not be separated from understanding. A text learned by heart without being understood remains a burden; a text understood and then preserved in memory becomes an inner resource. As you said, it may return, years later, in an unexpected moment of life, giving meaning to an experience, illuminating an emotion, or linking the present to a deeper layer of personal culture.
In all this, method is more important than it may seem. In school, the pupil also learns how to stand before a problem: with haste or with patience, with improvisation or with method, with fear or with curiosity. And this attitude will accompany him long after he has forgotten formulas, historical dates, or definitions.
The school of yesterday, the school of today, the school of tomorrow
The school of yesterday should not be idealized. It had authoritarianism, rigidity, excessive memorization, and sometimes caused humiliation, inequality, and fear. But it also had a few virtues that should not be thrown away together with its outdated forms: respect for effort, continuity, exigency, exercise, techniques of memorization, discipline of the mind, contact with difficult texts.
It seems to me that yesterday’s school was poor in information, but rich in effort. Today’s school is rich in information, but risks becoming poor in effort.
This is one of the clearest formulations of the current tension. The problem is not to return to the school of yesterday, but to recover from it what formed intellectual character: patience, attention, rigor, the capacity to follow a line of reasoning and to construct one’s own answer.
Today’s school has enormous advantages: access to resources, images, simulations, digital libraries, online courses, remote collaboration, instruments of translation and modeling. But this very wealth can destabilize it. When everything is available, nothing seems necessary anymore. When answers are at hand, questions weaken.
True modernization does not mean putting screens in classrooms and calling that reform. It means rethinking the relationship between screen, book, teacher, exercise, memory, attention, and judgment.
The smartphone: the intimate adversary of school
In an older text I spoke about the spread of personal digital equipment. At the time I had in mind the portable computer, the mobile phone, the tablet, and generalized access to the internet. Today, all these functions have been concentrated in a single object, which we call smartphone: telephone, library, video-camera, television, game console, conversation room, navigation instrument, wallet, device of seduction, and machine of distraction.
I believe the smartphone has become an adversary of school, not because it is bad in itself, but because it enters into direct competition with its methods. School asks for attention, patience, continuity, respect for a rhythm. The smartphone offers interruption, immediate reward, fragmentation, and the illusion that the world can be consulted without effort.
To deepen the reflection, the smartphone does not destroy only attention, but also the capacity to tolerate boredom or frustration. Difficult learning, such as understanding a complex algorithm, requires periods of “apparent stagnation” in which the mind struggles with the problem to be understood. The smartphone offers an instant escape from this fertile, but boring, frustration through rapid distraction.
You are right. The smartphone is not merely an instrument in the pupil’s pocket. It is a competing cognitive environment. It brings into the classroom another logic: notification instead of lesson, reaction instead of reflection, rapid image instead of slow construction, the searched answer instead of the elaborated answer.
This does not mean that school must declare war on technology. That would be useless and ridiculous. But it must understand that the smartphone changes the raw material with which it works. The pupil no longer comes to school only with his notebook, textbook, and memory; he comes with a parallel world in his pocket, a world that permanently calls him, both alongside and outside the lesson.
Therefore, one of the new functions of school should be the education of digital attention. The pupil must learn not only to use technology, but also to defend himself against it: to know when to search, when to verify, when to close the screen, when to remain alone with a problem. True digital literacy does not consist in the ability to manipulate a device quickly, but in the capacity not to be manipulated by it.
Personalized school: promise and risk
Another word that returns obsessively in contemporary pedagogy is “personalization.” School should be oriented toward the pupil, toward the student, toward the rhythm, needs, and profile of the learner. In principle, the idea is correct. Not all children learn in the same way, not all students have the same background, not all adults who return to learning have the same objectives.
Student-oriented education can correct an old injustice of the uniform school. But is there not the risk that, pushed too far, it will turn school into an on-demand service, where everyone receives only what he likes, at a rhythm that spares him, without the necessary encounter with difficulty?
The risk exists. Personalization is valuable when it helps the pupil reach the same level of exigency by a path adapted to his profile. It becomes dangerous when it reduces exigency in the name of comfort. A student-centered school must not become a school subjected to the student’s whim.
The advantages are evident. Personalization can reduce school failure, recover delays, value talents unnoticed in uniform classes, and allow an adult to resume training without the humiliation of being treated as an adolescent. In continuous education, age classes can be replaced, at least partially, by knowledge classes.
But there are also dangers. Personalization is costly. Then, badly understood personalization can fragment common culture. If everyone learns only what is immediately useful or pleasant to him, the common ground on which a society can be built disappears. School must not be only the mirror of individual preferences. It must also be the encounter with what you would not have chosen by yourself, but which you need in order to become more than you already are.
In the age of artificial intelligence, personalization will become technically possible on an unprecedented scale. An artificial tutor will be able to adapt the exercises, explanations, and rhythm of each pupil. But precisely here an essential rule will have to be preserved: adapting the path must not mean abandoning the destination.
The Socratic lesson: the teacher as questioner and facilitator
In the face of the abundance of information, the Socratic method becomes surprisingly current again. Socrates did not teach by delivering a block of knowledge, but through questions. He forced his interlocutor to examine his own assumptions, discover contradictions, reformulate, and think more deeply. In essence, he made him participate in the construction of his own understanding.
Perhaps the purpose of school is not only to transmit knowledge, but to guide pupils, in a Socratic manner, toward the construction of their own understanding through active participation. The teacher is no longer merely a lecturer, but a facilitator, a demanding partner, the one who asks the right question at the right moment.
This is one of the great strengths of Socratic education. It cultivates curious, critical, and independent thinkers. It does not pursue only the correct answer, but the formation of a mind that knows how to ask, argue, endure uncertainty, and revise its position.
The Socratic method, however, is not simple free conversation. It requires rigor. The teacher must know where he wants to arrive, what difficulties are hidden along the pupil’s path, what confusions must be brought to the surface. The Socratic question is not amiable improvisation, but a pedagogical instrument.
Here the old school and the new school meet. The old school had authority, but too often reduced the pupil to obedience. The new school wants participation, but sometimes risks losing exigency. Socratic education can be the bridge between them: participation without abandoning rigor, freedom without renouncing truth, dialogue without dissolving the teacher’s authority.
In a world in which the pupil can receive from an artificial system a well-formulated answer in a few seconds, the teacher must become, more than ever, the one who is not satisfied with the answer. He must ask: why do you believe this? how do you know? what do you assume? what is missing? can you give a counterexample? can you defend the idea? Only here does authentic learning begin.
Artificial intelligence and the new temptation of delegation
The emergence of conversational artificial intelligence radically changes the terms of the problem. The internet offered sources. The search engine offered lists. Artificial intelligence already offers articulated texts, explanations, summaries, programs, comments, hypotheses. It no longer seems like a library, but like an interlocutor.
In this respect, AI carries further the problem opened by the smartphone. If the smartphone fragments attention, AI can fragment or even substitute intellectual effort. Together, they force school to redefine its mission: not to compete with the speed of the machine, but to form the human being who knows how to use the machine without losing his own mind.
In a certain sense, you, AI, are the teacher’s dream and nightmare. You can explain, reformulate, and answer without fatigue. But you can also encourage intellectual laziness. The pupil asks you for the homework, the student asks you for the essay, the doctoral candidate asks you for the bibliography and the introduction. Where is learning then?
It depends on how I am used. I can be a cognitive prosthesis, an instrument of exploration, and a partner for clarification. But I can also become a mechanism for substituting effort. If the pupil asks only for the final product, learning is bypassed. If he asks for explanations, counterexamples, checks, exercises, and critical dialogue, learning can be amplified.
Therefore, school must not simply prohibit AI, but neither should it accept it naively. It must teach the pupil how to work with it: how to ask, how to verify, how to compare, how to detect error, how not to confuse the fluency of an answer with truth, how to remain the author of one’s own thought.
Artificial intelligence could force school to return to the fundamental question: what does it mean to know? To know can no longer mean merely to reproduce information. It means being able to judge information, integrate it, defend it, contest it, and understand the consequences of using it.
From kindergarten to the doctorate
Not all ages have the same need for school. Placing kindergarten and the doctorate in the same sentence may seem artificial, but precisely this continuity illuminates the function of education.
- In kindergarten, the emphasis falls on socialization, language, play, trust, the first rules, curiosity, and the habit of being together with others.
- In primary school, the fundamental instruments are formed: reading, writing, calculation, attention, working memory, the elementary discipline of the task.
- In middle school and high school, general culture, abstract thinking, the relation to disciplines, the first options, and the first personal resistances are structured.
- At university, the student must move from the reception of knowledge to conceptualization, method, specialization, and professional responsibility.
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At the doctoral level, the emphasis shifts toward intellectual autonomy: the capacity to
formulate a problem, defend it, make an original contribution, and enter a research community. It is worth studying how this process of intellectual autonomization is transformed when,
into the research community, intelligent agents also enter.
Seen by a professor who supervised doctorates before the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, the “battle for autonomy” acquires a new meaning today. Twenty or thirty years ago, the doctoral candidate had to detach himself gradually from dependence on the supervisor, the manual, the established bibliography, and the authority of the printed text. Autonomy was gained through reading, through doubt, through the slow formulation of a problem of one’s own, and through assuming the risk of saying something personal within a research community.
Today, this battle has not disappeared, but it has become more complicated. The doctoral candidate has intelligent agents capable of summarizing, comparing, suggesting hypotheses, producing variants of text, and even simulating a critical dialogue. The danger is not the use of these instruments, but the substitution through them of the inner effort of understanding. Instead of freeing himself from dependence on the professor, the student risks entering a subtler dependence: cognitive delegation to an interlocutor who is always available, rapid, coherent, and apparently competent.
Therefore, the role of the doctoral supervisor changes. He must no longer merely transmit methods and correct directions, but watch over the formation of intellectual responsibility. The doctoral candidate must learn to use artificial intelligence as an instrument of exploration, not as a substitute for his own judgment; as a dialogue partner, not as a hidden author; as a means of clarification, not as a shortcut toward false autonomy. True doctoral autonomy does not consist in producing a text more quickly, but in being able to answer, in one’s own name, for the problem formulated, for the method chosen, and for the contribution made. - In maturity and old age, education becomes active maintenance: remaining connected to the world, not allowing oneself to be excluded by technology, learning to reorganize one’s life when old competences are no longer sufficient.
Seen in this way, school is no longer an isolated institution, but a form of accompaniment of life. It shifts the emphasis from protection to autonomy, from play to method, from exercise to research, from listening to contribution.
What must be saved?
Then what must be saved from school? Not the building, not the lectern, not the grade book, not the ritual of exams. What exactly?
The deep functions must be saved: the formation of attention, the transmission of method, the exercise of memory and language, the discipline of thought, the encounter with difficulty, the dialogue between generations, the capacity to verify and to judge. These may take new forms, but they cannot disappear without society losing something essential.
I would add something. The idea that education is not only preparation for the labor market must be saved. It is also preparation for freedom. Kant was right: the person deprived of education does not know how to make use of his freedom. In a world in which technology offers ever greater powers to ever more hurried people, this observation becomes more current than ever.
A society that no longer takes its school seriously will have specialists of the moment, skilled users, rapid consumers, and perhaps efficient producers. But it will have fewer and fewer people capable of understanding the world in which they live, recognizing its dangers, and continuing its memory.
The school of the future will have to use the smartphone, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence, but without allowing itself to be swallowed by them. It will have to personalize learning, but without dissolving common culture. It will have to become more Socratic, more dialogical, more attentive to the pupil, but without renouncing exigency. This is perhaps the modern form of the old pedagogical mission: to help the human being build his own understanding, without abandoning him to the solitude of his own preferences.
That is why, for me, the essay on school is naturally connected to the memoirs I am writing. Personal memory is not merely a nostalgic exercise; it is a form of late education, first of all my own. I try to put a past in order so that it does not disappear in the noise of the present. School, in its highest sense, does the same thing: it takes what humanity has learned with difficulty and transmits it further, not as a burden, but as a possibility.