Can AI fix education without breaking it?
AI is already changing education, but schools, teachers and policymakers are not all moving at the same speed.
In this episode of Hardwired: The Human Algorithm, Lena Chauhan sits down with Dan Fitzpatrick, bestselling author, former teacher and one of the leading voices on AI in education, for a nuanced conversation about what AI is exposing about our education system and what we need to do next.
Dan has trained more than 100,000 educators globally and advised governments and parliamentary bodies on AI and education. Rather than approaching AI as either the solution or the threat, Lena and Dan explore the much harder territory in between.
They discuss the enormous gap in AI adoption between schools, the pressure already facing teachers, the lack of institutional capacity for change, and what happens when a fast-moving technology collides with an education system that was never designed to evolve at the same speed.
But the conversation goes deeper than how schools should “use AI.”
Are we using AI to improve education, or simply making an outdated system more efficient?
Dan challenges an education model increasingly optimised around exams, grades, memorisation and the regurgitation of information, asking whether those measures still prepare young people for a world in which AI can increasingly reproduce information for them.
Lena and Dan explore what this means for assessment, teacher judgement and the human relationship between teacher and student. If AI can mark work and reduce workload, what might teachers stop seeing about how a child thinks, learns and struggles?
They also examine bias, critical thinking and epistemic humility. AI can reproduce bias, but humans bring their own biases too. Dan explains how AI can be used not simply to provide answers, but to challenge our assumptions, surface underrepresented perspectives and broaden our thinking.
And perhaps the most important question becomes not whether we can eliminate bias from AI, but whether we can equip young people with the judgement to recognise it, question it and make better decisions when they encounter it.
This is a conversation about AI, education, teachers, assessment, critical thinking, bias, policy and innovation, but ultimately it asks something much bigger:
If AI can increasingly give our children the answer, what should education be teaching them to do that machines cannot?
Guest: Dan Fitzpatrick, bestselling author and AI education expert
Host: Lena Chauhan, Founder of Rise IQ
Podcast: Hardwired: The Human Algorithm
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