Reimagining education: Balancing AI tools with human creativity

Antecedents of pedagogy in teaching go back to the prehistoric era, with the pictorial mode being the channel to exchange ideas or transfer knowledge. If we scan through the annals of the Eastern concept of management and go back to the techniques of imparting education in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, we discover that it was primarily oral, practical, and experiential teaching.

Be it kul guru Vasistha, who taught the Vedas, governance, or principles of dharma to Lord Rama and his brothers in the Ramayana, or Guru Drona Acharya training the Pandavas and Kauravas in the Mahabharata, it was about learning through experiencing and transforming. Even Western Greek and Latin mythology exhibited oral traditions through sermonic storytelling, symbolic narratives, or poetic dissemination of knowledge, as in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

Education evolved in the Gurukul days of ancient India from being spiritual to being practical and strategic, from forest ashrams to organised gurukuls. Yet, the methodology of teaching remained the same. It was based on oral traditions, self-learning, and practical demonstration. The guru was the external guide, always available for students to reach out to for guidance. Assessment was based on continuous observation of progress and delivery, discussions and debates, oral questioning and defence, with practical demonstration as evidence of acquired skills. The Guru’s oral verdict in front of the entire class was the certificate of success. Subsequently, attempts were made to codify and store knowledge in different physical forms like clay tablets. Over 30,000 of these were found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, now Iraq, where traces of one of the first libraries were found.

Biggest academic paradox

Let’s fast forward to the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when pen, ink, and printing machines facilitated the transfer of knowledge, with the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1602 being one of the earliest. The discovery of the internet in 1983 and the World Wide Web in the 90s subsequently carried the physical library into the virtual space, so much so that the younger cohort and digital natives—the Gen Z of current times—have almost completely lost touch with reading hard copies of text. Kindle, audiobooks, short-form apps, and news apps became the new sources of knowledge.

But the biggest disrupter in the entire technological evolution of human history has been Generative AI and now Agentic AI. The challenge for the teaching community is how to crack the code for the biggest academic paradox: on one hand, allowing the freedom of using technology in education, and on the other hand, the impending threat of AI potentially damaging human creativity and cognitive abilities, as reported in the 2025 MIT Media Lab study authored by Dr. Natalia Kosmyna. Should we then stop the younger cohort from using Generative AI tools for their academic responsibilities? No, we can’t, and neither should we.

Should we allow Gen Z and Alpha to completely outsource their brains to Agentic AI and slowly disappear into knowledge absentia and creativity dementia? No, not at all.

Human in the loop

Keeping our focus on the above, let academicians design assignments and experiential learning tools that allow the use of all AI tools by students for what AI can do, but assess them for what AI can’t do—something that can only be achieved with the human loop. For example, we can give them an assignment on a new product launch strategy and implementation on campus itself. The students may be assessed on the following components:

1. Innovative use of AI tools for aspects it can deliver

2. Creativity and innovation in product design, packaging, pricing, placement, and creating real-time awareness on campus

3. Monitoring the actual launch of the product on campus

Let academicians design assignments and experiential learning tools that allow the use of all AI tools by students for what AI can do, but assess them for what AI can’t do—something that can only be achieved with the human loop.

The entire assessment process must be based on creativity, innovation, execution, and transformation in the field. The age of examining for information, computation, routine content creation, and analytics is fraught with difficulties. It may be done in offline mode in a physical classroom environment, but certainly not on the internet in remote mode. We must focus on and train students in creativity, executional excellence, and real transformation, making them industry-ready where routine job roles are being absorbed by AI tools. Artificial Intelligence cannot copy creativity, emotion, executional excellence, and transformation, which are critical success factors.

Teaching subjects like retail operations and store management must be aided with case studies and experiential learning. Why not make students create a small retail store on campus? Divide the class into groups of 10 each and ask them to run the retail store for a week—handling everything from procuring products, pricing, visual merchandising, and inventory management to advertising and selling. At the end of the week, let each group present their retail and marketing strategy, and finally the P&L, integrating practical learning with theoretical concepts and frameworks. They can use AI for certain aspects of store management, reducing time spent on routine tasks and allowing them to focus on execution and customer interaction to sell better. The best way to learn the P&L is by drawing it based on real-time data.

But the elephant in the room, which will surface sooner or later, because most companies are now actively adopting AI for automation, inventory management, sales and production forecasting, and many other routine tasks will sound the death knell for lower-level white-collar jobs, a trend that is already visible. Our teaching pedagogy and methodology require a paradigm shift.

As academicians, we must train our students to be hands-on, practical, and creative in the pursuit of executional excellence, delivering real-time results. Rather than creating an agent for themselves, let us also train them to be agents of transformation and change.

The focus must now shift towards building creativity and out-of-the-box thinking among students. Assignments may be real-time, wherein the discretion and decision-making ability of a student are tested. Academicians must train students to enhance their emotional intelligence and interpersonal relationships. Companies are looking for team players.

Old, mundane, and routine jobs will be replaced by roles focusing on execution and delivering on the ground for productivity and growth metrics. Machines and technology can create and project patterns based on previous production and sales history, but it is the human brain that can usher in freshness and newness, without which no business is sustainable.

In addition to examining knowledge and strengthening the critical analytical mental faculty of students—which is extremely important for cognitive development—we must also focus on developing creativity, innovation, executional excellence, and transformational skills among Gen Z and Alpha, who are not just digital natives but future human-machine fusion inhabitants of the new technological world. As they grow, we want them to be creative agents of change for human society.

(By Prof. Jyoti Sankar Das, BIMTECH and Prof. Anand Kumar Jaiswal, IIM–Ahmedabad)

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