The popular claim that AI will ‘democratise’ education tends to relate to a very narrow sense of democracy in terms of increasing people’s access to education provision. As we have seen in previous chapters, any such outcomes remain highly speculative. Yet, even if true, what constitutes democratic education is generally understood to stretch well beyond giving everyone opportunities to learn. Indeed, it could be argued that the values underpinning current forms of educational AI – e.g. individualism, mastery-based learning, automation of teaching – work directly against many of the core elements of how democratic education has been talked about by educationalists such as John Dewey (1902, 1916) over the past hundred years or so.

As Michał Wieczorek (2025) argues, the current push for educational AI is resulting in technologies that diminish students’ opportunities for communication and collaboration with others. These are forms of AI that habituate students into feeling that they have little (or no) control over their learning environments. All told, these are forms of AI that do a lousy job of preparing young people for living together with others and collectively dealing with shared problems – all things that we might hope democratic citizens to be able to do.

Of course, it is possible to imagine alternate forms of educational AI that might be based around radically different democratic-enhancing goals and principles. For example, we might imagine forms of AI that support experiential learning, connect students from diverse backgrounds together in collaborative ways that expose them to diverse worldviews. However, for the time being, it seems that there is little interest and/or market incentive for any such form of AI to be developed. Educational AI remains firmly wrapped in individualistic notions of ‘democracy’.

References

Dewey, J. (1902/1956). The child and the curriculum. University of Chicago Press. 

Dewey, J. (1916/2016). Democracy and education. Macmillan.

Wieczorek, M. (2025). Why AI will not democratize education: a critical pragmatist perspective. Philosophy & Technology, 38(2):53 – doi.org/10.1007/s13347-025-00883-8