Following the recent “Pisa shock” regarding German educational performance, OECD Education Director Andreas Schleicher stated that the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is partly responsible for the country’s weak results. Speaking to the Handelsblatt (Friday Edition), Schleicher warned that “if AI becomes a convenient path to a finished answer, it undermines learning.”
He noted that students who used AI performed worse, on average, than those who opted not to use it. However, Schleicher stressed that this observation does not constitute an argument against the technology itself. Instead, it necessitates a shift toward a different educational approach. He argued that “AI must not replace critical thinking; it must make it more challenging.”
According to Schleicher, technology is neither the enemy nor the sole answer. When educators employ technology to challenge students-such as comparing different explanations, exposing flawed reasoning, sharpening arguments, or crafting better questions-then AI can function as an exceptional accelerant.
Successful educational systems, he maintained, are those that foster this engagement. Learning fundamentally requires intellectual effort, friction, and often struggle, elements that cannot be outsourced. Reinforcing this point, Schleicher cautioned that if education fails to strongly promote and protect moral values and human capabilities, artificial intelligence could ultimately erode the foundations of society.
Finally, Schleicher urged Germany to be ambitious in its school digitalization efforts. According to the educational researcher, merely digitizing last-generation schools is fruitless. The true goal is to reconfigure space, time, personnel, and technology to facilitate entirely new and impactful learning experiences.
