By Siddharth Rajgarhia
As India celebrates National Education Day 2025, honouring the visionary Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, we are faced with a pressing and transformative question: How do we educate for agency in an age of automation?
We are at the confluence of two powerful forces: Artificial Intelligence and Human Aspiration. AI has seeped into the cracks of our daily existence: guiding traffic, curating content, predicting exams, and even tailoring lesson plans. Yet, in this incredible technological ascent lies an equally powerful imperative: to ensure that education remains the birthplace of wisdom, not just knowledge.
The Promise and Paradox of AI
AI-driven tools now personalize learning at scale, streamline administrative tasks, and provide insights with remarkable precision. A teacher with AI becomes a data-empowered guide. A student with AI becomes a self-paced explorer. But if we aren’t vigilant, the same AI can also narrow perspectives, reinforce biases, and displace the need for contemplation. When algorithms define what is visible and valuable, they may quietly erode the learner’s agency; the power to question, to discern, and to choose.
Thus, the deeper role of education today is not just to prepare students to use AI, but to empower them to shape it.
Education as a Sanctuary of Agency
Agency is born from judgment, nurtured by empathy, and shaped by context. These cannot be downloaded. They must be lived. To preserve agency, schools must anchor themselves in three interwoven human truths:
Rigor: cultivating curiosity and cognitive resilience in the face of complexity.
Relevance: tying learning to real-world meaning and moral questions.
Relationships: fostering teacher-student bonds that no chatbot can replace.
Imagine a learner asking: “What values guide the creation of this AI tool?” or “Whose voices are missing in this dataset?” These are not technical questions, but they are ethical ones. And they are the questions that will define our collective future.
Shaping Workers and World Makers
As jobs evolve, education must pivot not to outpace machines, but to humanize the workplace. The skills of the future are collaboration, creativity, ethical reasoning, and intercultural empathy, which are deeply human. AI can simulate them, but it cannot embody them.
India’s National Education Policy has already emphasized experiential learning, vocational training, and digital access. Now is the moment to blend those with a bold ethical vision is to create institutions that prepare students not just to earn a living, but to craft a life of meaning.
We must also address the digital divide for not just in access, but in understanding. AI literacy must be part of every student’s toolkit, alongside emotional literacy and cultural awareness.
Towards a New Educational Vision
Preserving human agency means making sure students are not passive recipients of AI systems, but active participants in designing, questioning, and reimagining them. This calls for a new kind of educational leadership; one that balances core work (improving the systems of today) with exploration work (imagining the possibilities of tomorrow). Leaders must allocate resources wisely, not just to implement technology, but to ensure it aligns with the school’s deepest vision.
Conclusion: A Human-Centered Future
We must remember that Education is not about racing against AI. It is about rising with our humanity intact. Let us reimagine schools where learners decode both machine learning and moral dilemmas; where they build both code and character; and where they are taught not just how the world works, but how it ought to work.
In the words of Dr. Srikumar Rao “Do everything from the space of joy. And when uncertainty comes, meet it not with fear, but with the curiosity of a sculptor meeting marble.”
This National Education Day, may we sculpt learners who are not only future-ready—but also future- worthy. In preserving human agency, we preserve the soul of education. And in doing so, we prepare a generation not just to adapt to the future, but to shape it with wisdom, compassion, and creativity.
(The above article is authored by Siddharth Rajgarhia, Co-Founder Equanimity Learning, Chief Learner and Director, Delhi Public School- Varanasi, Nashik, Lava Nagpur & Hinjawadi Pune. Views are his personal)
Last Updated on: Friday, November 28, 2025 5:06 pm by Admin | Published by: Outlook News Team on Friday, November 28, 2025 4:59 pm | News Categories: Brand Post
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