The conversation around Artificial Intelligence in education often gets stuck on the tools. We debate the merits of different apps, the risks of cheating, and the best ways to write a prompt. But these new technologies are leading to discussions of much deeper questions including the purpose of education and the nature of knowledge? These discussions are not easy, coming. From cross disciplinary directions and often invoking philosophical understandings. However, I am going to try to summarise the some of the ideas, as much to help my own understandings as well as readers on this blog.

First up is a series of recent blogs and comments on LinkedIn by Ilkka Tuomi, a researcher and Chief Scientist at Meaning Processing Ltd, a Finnish research company. In a recent article on LinkedIn, he challenged us to step back and reconsider the very purpose of education in a world where thinking is no longer confined to the human brain.

For decades, we’ve understood education as serving three main functions. First, the development of the individual, helping them realise their personal potential. Second, qualification, preparing them to participate in society and the economy. And third, transformation, equipping them with the critical capacity to challenge and renew our culture and institutions. This model is built on a familiar, human-centred foundation where learning happens inside an individual’s head. But as Tuomi argues, this is no longer the full picture.

Thinking With the World

A posthumanist perspective, as Tuomi explains, suggests that cognition is not an isolated, internal process. Instead, it is distributed across people, tools, environments, and institutions. A carpenter doesn’t just think with her brain; she thinks with her hands, her tools, and the materials she works with. A scientist thinks with her lab equipment, her colleagues, and the body of research that came before her. The same is true for all of us. Thinking is a messy, embodied, and collaborative process.

Artificial Intelligence, particularly large language models, makes this distributed reality impossible to ignore. These tools are not just fancy calculators; they are becoming part of the cognitive systems we use to make sense of the world. This shift doesn’t make the classic functions of education obsolete, but it does force us to reframe them in a powerful new light.

A New Look at Learning

What does this mean for those of us in vocational education and training? Tuomi’s reframing offers a practical way to think beyond simply “using AI” and toward a more profound integration.

First, individual development—or ‘formation’—is no longer just about nurturing innate potential. It’s about re-patterning how we engage with the world. Learning becomes less about filling a student’s head with knowledge and more about shaping their habits, their patterns of attention, and their ability to interact with complex systems. In this view, an AI is not a tool for instruction, but a part of the environment in which thinking happens. The goal is to help learners develop the dispositions to use these tools critically and creatively.

Second, ‘qualification’ becomes more than just preparing someone for a job. It becomes about giving them access to what Tuomi calls “cognitive infrastructures.” Think of a specific professional field, a digital platform, or a scientific discipline. These are all complex systems with their own languages, tools, and ways of thinking. Qualification, then, is the process of inducting a learner into these systems, helping them become fluent participants in a world where agency is shared between humans and technology. It’s about learning to ‘feel’ the practice of a profession, not just learning the facts.

Finally, ‘transformation’ is no longer just about fostering critical consciousness in individuals. If thinking is distributed, then changing the world requires more than just changing minds; it requires changing the systems we think with. Transformation happens when we alter our practices, our tools, and our environments. By introducing new tools like AI, we are already reconfiguring our cognitive systems. The educational challenge is to make this process deliberate, to create new ways of participating and doing that allow new ways of thinking to emerge.

The Way Forward

This perspective moves us beyond the endless debate about whether AI is “good” or “bad” for education. It suggests that the real task is to understand how these tools are changing the very nature of cognition and to adapt our pedagogy accordingly. The challenge for VET is not just to train learners in how to use AI, but to design learning experiences that help them thrive in a world where thinking is a team sport, played with a growing team of human and non-human partners.

Ilkka Tuomi’s work reminds us that education is the deliberate intervention in these structures. By embracing this broader, more systemic view, we can ensure that we are preparing learners not just for the jobs of tomorrow, but for a future where they can both participate in and transform the world they inherit.

About the Image

This image is intended to evoke critical thought about the diversity and richness of context that can be lost when we reduce phenomena to restrictive categories or 'ground truths' that are in fact subjective. This is an issue often seen in the application of AI technologies that predict and classify complex subjects like human identity. While the piece was inspired by AI-powered erasure of LGBTQ+ identities, the symbolic rainbow could be taken to represent diversity or plural perspectives in many forms. This image was created in Medibang Paint.