There was a time when radio changed public conversation and another time when television reorganized everyday life. Then the internet arrived. Today, artificial intelligence is entering our cultures with comparable, albeit deeper, force. It is not limited to transmitting content, it also helps to produce it, organize it and make it look reasonable. Therefore, the impact of this new technology forces us to ask ourselves if we should adjust the central axis that we give to education.
For years, much of school and college rewarded skills that made sense in a world where summarizing, writing, organizing information, and producing acceptable answers were costly. But now AI has changed the value of those tasks. If a machine can help you do in seconds what once took hours, education can no longer continue to be organized as if the core of learning were just the right answer. The problem is no longer just access and processing of information, but what to do with it, how to examine it and with what criteria we decide if it deserves to be taken into account and used.
A study published in 2024 in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Q1 magazine in Scimago, warns that personalized algorithmic environments can reduce exposure to diverse perspectives and favor a narrowing of the field of experience and judgment. That is, the algorithm produces narrow minds. General culture broadens our way of understanding the world, making it the best antidote to the unique dimensionality of the algorithm, which makes us confuse familiarity with truth, and preference with criteria.
Perhaps the problem is not just how much STEM we teach, but how much we have underestimated general culture, imagination, judgment, and comprehensive humanistic training at a time when some of the technique is beginning to become assisted. It is not about opposing humanities and science, but about understanding that AI reorders the layers of knowledge. Thanks to it, more people have access to technical skills that previously seemed reserved for specialists, but that does not eliminate in-depth knowledge, it moves it towards more specialized levels. This is precisely why it becomes more important to have a broad base that allows us to better understand, contextualize and imagine what information is credible and how it is worth using.
It’s not just an intuition. In a recent study, based on a survey of 2,000 students and interviews with 100 teachers from three universities in Vietnam, 75% of students reported having strengthened their critical thinking, while 68% reported analyzing problems from ethical, historical and cultural perspectives. In a country like Peru, where educational inequality already determines who interprets reality better and who barely learns to reproduce information without understanding it thoroughly, we cannot continue treating general culture as an accessory or a luxury. If we continue like this, we will only create greater cognitive and social gaps.
Education in the AI era should not be resigned to training efficient users. In a world governed by algorithms your task is more demanding. It has to train people capable of thinking with them without being subordinated by their apparent ease.
*El Comercio opens its pages to the exchange of ideas and reflections. In this plural framework, the Diario does not necessarily agree with the opinions of the columnists who sign them, although it always respects them.
