The Emancipatory Wager
What Schools Must Bet On in the Age of AI
This month, I've spent time examining the role of AI in K-12 education. For the final essay, I wanted to step back and ask a fundamental question: What is education actually for? Asking that question is about more than students, teachers, and schools; it’s about what kind of society we're building and what we believe human beings are capable of becoming.
This week’s piece begins with inspiration from a Brazilian educator:
On Literacy and Liberty
Paulo Freire came to understand education not as a method for filling empty vessels with knowledge, but as a tool of liberation. He developed this philosophy in 1960s Brazil, working among impoverished, illiterate peasants (camponeses) while his country stumbled toward military dictatorship. When the coup came in 1964, approximately 40% of the country’s population could neither read nor write.
Freire’s philosophy rested on a simple observation: illiteracy wasn’t just an educational deficit, it was a tool of oppression. In Brazil at the time, illiterates couldn’t vote, so keeping peasants illiterate was a way of keeping them politically powerless. But his insights went a step further — the people he worked with had internalized their own oppression. They believed they were incapable of learning, that education was for other people, and that their own knowledge and experience had no value.
In 1968, while in exile in Chile, Freire wrote:
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
Education, in its most essential form, is emancipatory. It builds the capacities that make genuine freedom possible: the ability to think independently, express oneself coherently, resist manipulation, and participate meaningfully in civic life. But emancipation requires capacity, and capacity requires practice, an effortful, friction-filled practice.
Today, when a ninth-grader submits an essay written by ChatGPT — his teacher unable to tell the difference — we must ask ourselves if that student has been afforded, or stripped of, an opportunity to build his emancipatory capacities. Is his a path toward liberation, or does it point in the direction of dependence? Has the appearance of learning replaced its substance? Which kind of education are we building?
When we allow students to outsource cognitive work to algorithms, we don’t make them freer; we make them reliant and vulnerable. The question before schools now is whether we will build capacity or ensure that a generation is defined by its dependence on tools it doesn’t understand and can’t do without.
Freedom Requires Capacities, Not Just Opportunities
In the decades that followed, Freire’s ideas reverberated domestically and across the globe. At home in Brazil, literacy rates grew and democracy returned to the country. Abroad, his philosophy played a central role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, and research institutes bearing his name were founded in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere.
Through education, Freire’s theories expanded freedom around the world. But what does it mean for freedom to grow? To answer that question, we turn to another scholar: Isaiah Berlin.
In 1958 at the University of Oxford, Berlin delivered a lecture entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty” in which he outlined the distinction between “negative liberty” — freedom from interference, coercion, and manipulation — and “positive liberty” — freedom to act according to one’s own reason and will.
Both matter. Both are shaped by education. Both are threatened.
Negative Liberty: Freedom From Domination
Berlin said: “liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’” In other words, negative liberty is about being protected from interference.
In today’s educational environments, negative liberty may involve protection from:
These forces emerge from the economic logic of Silicon Valley. The proliferation of artificial intelligence has accelerated and entrenched them further.
If education is tasked with the emancipation of its subjects, schools must conceive of themselves as sanctuaries, shielding their students from the intrusion and effects of such forces. Schools are one of the few institutions that can create bounded spaces where students are protected, where negative liberty is a central affordance for their intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development.
Positive Liberty: Freedom To Think and Act
But protection alone is insufficient. Berlin explained that positive liberty “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’” Put more simply, it can be understood as a kind of self-mastery. Positive liberty requires capacity:
Sustained attention: you can’t think deeply if you can’t focus;
Working memory: you can’t reason if you can’t hold information;
The ability to construct and articulate arguments: persuasion, evidence, clarity;
Metacognitive awareness: understanding your own thinking;
Executive function: self-regulation, planning, judgment.
These capacities aren’t abstractions. They’re the cognitive infrastructure that makes everything else possible. They enable our freedom to do anything at all. You can’t participate in democracy if you can’t form coherent positions. You can’t resist manipulation if you can’t evaluate arguments. You can’t exercise genuine choice if you can’t deliberate. You can’t be free if you can’t direct your own attention.
Therefore, schools must aid in developing their students’ capacity; they must create the conditions under which our positive liberties can expand.
The Social Dimension: Freedom as Collective Practice
But freedom — positive or negative — isn’t created or protected in isolation. Freire wrote, “No one liberates anyone else, nor do they liberate themselves alone. People liberate themselves in communion.” Emancipation isn’t just individual; it requires collective capacities:
The ability to argue in public, face-to-face;
To disagree productively;
To change one’s mind when presented with evidence from another;
To build consensus or agree to disagree;
To engage in the messy, vital work of negotiating understanding.
The classroom is a place where these capacities are practised. When AI siloes learning — each student in their own adaptive pathway — it eliminates the social friction where civic capacity is built.
These capacities don’t emerge automatically. They must be deliberately cultivated through practice. But AI threatens to remove precisely the practice that builds them. And worse still, it makes this removal seem like progress.
How AI Undermines Freedom: Dispossession and Internalized Dependence
If the previous section established what freedom requires, this section examines how AI systematically undermines those requirements. It operates through two mechanisms: systematic dispossession (the removal of protected space) and internalized dependence (the atrophy of capacity). Together, they constitute the inverse of Berlin’s liberties — not freedom, but a new form of subjugation that masquerades as empowerment.
Systematic Dispossession: The Failure of Negative Liberty
If negative liberty requires protection from interference, we should be concerned that schools have become sites of exposure:
One-to-one device programmes put tools of distraction directly into students’ hands;
Learning management systems harvest data and automate what should be human judgement;
EdTech platforms optimize for engagement using the same behavioural psychology that makes social media addictive;
AI tools embed themselves in the learning process, mediating cognitive tasks.
This is systematic dispossession: students are stripped of the protected conditions they need for development. Rather than function as sanctuaries from the attention economy, schools replicate its mechanisms. The space where negative liberty should be preserved becomes that site where it’s violated.
The dispossession is gradual and feels benign, or even helpful. Tech companies promise “personalization”. Administrators adopt tools to appear “innovative”. Teachers “meet students where they are”. But the result is the same: students lose access to the bounded, protected environments where deep learning is possible, and one half of their liberty — the negative half — is quietly compromised.
Internalized Dependence: The Atrophy of Positive Liberty
Freire noted that oppression’s most nefarious aspect was internalized: his students believed they weren’t deserving of the ability to read. But it’s through the acquisition of such capacities that freedom expands.
Positive liberty requires the capacity to think, reason, judge, and act according to one’s own will. But AI removes the practice that builds those capacities. In my recent piece about the Brookings Premortem on AI in Education, I outlined AI’s developmental doom loop:
Student encounters difficulty (a challenging essay, a complex problem)
Uses AI to bypass or to outsource a portion of that difficulty
The capacity that would have been built through struggle remains undeveloped
Next difficulty feels even more insurmountable (because capacity hasn’t grown)
Dependence deepens
Student internalizes inadequacy: “I can’t do this without AI”
Just as Freire observed among the camponeses — who came to believe that they were incapable of learning, that education was for others, and that their own minds were insufficient — today’s students are learning a parallel lesson: they can’t write without an LLM, can’t reason without algorithmic assistance, and can’t function without tools they don’t understand.
But this belief isn’t a reflection of some inevitable reality; it’s evidence of atrophy. Capacities, including the self-confidence that comes from exercising them, never develop because the practice was outsourced.
This isn’t accidental. From the vendor’s perspective, dependence is a highly lucrative business model. Students who believe they can’t function, or compete, without these tools become permanent customers. The more essential the tools seem, the more profitable they become.
The result is that the positive half of liberty becomes impossible. Self-mastery requires a self with capacities to master. When those capacities never develop, freedom becomes an abstract, unrealizable concept.
Siloed Learning and the Elimination of Collective Practice
Freire argued that liberation happens “in communion” through collective practice. Democracy requires social organization, deliberation, and compromise. Being in proximity to others — intellectually, physically, and socially — is foundational to its success.
AI undermines this dimension by design. Adaptive learning platforms create individualized pathways — each student working alone, receiving algorithmic feedback, progressing at their own pace. This seems like “personalization”, but it’s actually isolation.
The classroom’s social friction — arguing, listening, and revising your position — disappears in the algorithmic silos of adaptive learning platforms. Students practise private mastery, not public reasoning. They learn to justify answers to algorithms, but not to fellow humans — a messier and more difficult endeavour.
When learning is siloed, the collective capacities that make democratic participation possible fail to develop properly. Students learn to optimize for measures of narrowly defined “correctness”, but not to argue for what they believe.
AI dispossesses students of protected space (negative liberty), allows capacity (positive liberty) to atrophy through outsourcing, and siloes learning in ways that eliminate collective practice.
If this is the problem, what does the emancipatory response look like? What must schools do to build capacity rather than undermine it?
The Emancipatory Wager: What Education Must Bet On
Every educational decision is a wager about what matters. When we design curriculum, choose tools, structure classrooms, we’re betting on what will prove valuable, not just for employment but for human flourishing, for democratic participation, and for the ability to live with dignity and genuine agency.
The question before us now: What should we bet on?
The Core Principle: Capacity Before Tools
If education is to remain emancipatory, one principle must guide all decisions: build capacity before offering tools that can substitute for it.
This isn’t anti-technology; it’s pro-sequence. Students who learn to write without AI can later use AI wisely to evaluate output, knowing when to rely on it and when to think for themselves. Students who never develop that capacity become permanently dependent.
The principle applies across domains:
Handwriting before typing because the motor engagement strengthens memory and learning;
Sustained reading before summarization tools;
Mental calculation before calculators;
Essay composition, from blank page to finished argument, before any AI assistance.
The sequence matters. These foundational practices build an autonomous cognitive architecture. Skip them and the foundations of that architecture look and feel like sand rather than stone. Introduce tools later and students can use them with judgement. Introduce them too soon and dependence becomes inevitable.
This is what Freire understood: you can’t liberate someone by doing the work for them. Liberation requires the practice of freedom, which is effortful and friction-filled.
The Two Wagers
Wager One: Bet on Efficiency
Assumption: The future belongs to those who can do more, faster, with less effort
Strategy: Adopt AI early; let it handle cognitive labour; optimize for measurable output
Appeal: Seems practical, forward-thinking, aligned with market demands
Risk: Students never develop underlying capacity; dependence masquerades as empowerment
Outcome: A generation equipped with powerful tools but lacking the judgement to use them wisely, unable to function when tools fail, incapable of evaluating algorithmic output, permanently dependent on systems they don’t understand
Wager Two: Bet on Capacity
Assumption: The future belongs to those who can think independently, exercise judgement, resist manipulation, and act with genuine agency
Strategy: Build cognitive foundations first; introduce AI only after capacity exists; prioritize depth over speed, process over product
Appeal: Prepares students for genuine autonomy rather than technological dependence; builds capacities that transfer across contexts and remain valuable regardless of which tools dominate the market; honours education’s deepest purpose: the cultivation of free human beings
Risk: Students might feel disadvantaged in the short term; schools might seem “behind”; parents might question the approach
Outcome: A generation with the cognitive sovereignty to navigate an AI-saturated world, able to use tools without being used by them, capable of judgement about when to rely on algorithms and when to think for themselves
What the Emancipatory Wager Requires
Too often, we privilege individual success and adapt our pedagogies to optimize for it, but this dilemma is not about individuals; this is about the kind of society we’re building.
One possibility is a world in which most people depend on digital prosthetics to mediate basic cognitive tasks, where thinking is frequently outsourced, where judgement atrophies from disuse, and where freedom is hollow because the capacity to exercise it never developed.
Another possibility is a world in which people retain cognitive sovereignty, where technology serves human purposes rather than humans serving technological imperatives, where schools succeed in building the capacities that make genuine freedom possible.
So the emancipatory wager — the bet on capacity — isn’t just a pedagogical preference, it’s an institutional commitment that requires courage. Schools choose between these futures every day. A ninth-grader who wants to use ChatGPT doesn’t understand that short-term convenience comes at the cost of long-term capacity. That’s why adults must exercise the mature judgement their education helped them develop. We must make the emancipatory wager on their behalf.
Education has always been a wager on human potential — a bet that, given the right conditions, people can develop capacities they don’t yet possess. This bet requires faith: the belief that students can learn to write, to think, to argue, to reason. It requires patience: the willingness to let students struggle rather than providing shortcuts. It requires courage: the institutional courage to resist pressures toward efficiency when efficiency undermines the deeper work.
The students in our classrooms now will inherit a world we can’t fully predict. The technologies will change, the tools will evolve, the challenges will shift. We can’t prepare them for specific circumstances we can’t foresee.
But we can build the capacities that make navigation possible. These capacities are the infrastructure of freedom. They’re what make choice meaningful, participation possible, and autonomy real.
Freire fought for literacy in Brazil because reading wasn’t just a skill; it was the foundation for political participation, for critical consciousness, for the ability to challenge oppression. Today’s literacy includes the capacity to think without algorithmic assistance, to direct one’s own attention, to function independently of tools designed to create dependence.
That’s the emancipatory wager. It’s the bet that human capacity, deliberately cultivated, is more valuable than algorithmic efficiency. That struggle builds strength. That friction produces growth. That the hard work of thinking is worth protecting, especially in an age when tools promise to do it for us.
If this piece resonated with you, please consider sharing it with the educators, administrators, and parents in your network. The question of what schools owe their students, and what kind of capacities we must protect and cultivate, deserves the widest possible conversation.
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Brilliant - so very clear. The whole discussion around ed tech comes back to such a foundational level of educational philosophy. It's about how children learn and why we educate them in the first place. It's why politicians should be nowhere near dictating educational processes: they are only motivated by power, profit and expediency.
Thank you so much for this - and for highlighting Paulo Freire’s work. I lived in Brazil for many years and was involved in teaching adult literacy. Freire’s legacy lives on - I came across supermarkets running adult literacy classes.
You have set out the problems and the solution with great clarity. We are currently being seduced by the superficial and the simple and - dare I say it - the ‘be kind’ approach. What sounds nicer than personalised, individual ‘learning’ which provides the levellest of level playing fields? The ensuing isolation and incapacity doesn’t even register.
I will be sharing this widely. Thank you again.