Futures in Context
Chapter 3 begins not with AI, but with a knock at the door. Richard Kearney’s image of hospitality — opening without knowing in advance whether the visitor is a messiah or a monster — frames what Liam Wegimont, Executive Director of Global Education Network Europe, calls the central challenge: you can only open the door well if you know what your home is for.
That question — what is education actually for? — turns out to be far less settled than most AI policy debates assume. Wegimont maps four competing models of education: the transmission of academic knowledge, personal development, social integration, and social transformation. Most schools have drifted between the first three. The fourth — education as a force for justice, solidarity, and genuine change — remains the most neglected. And it is precisely the one that AI makes most urgent.
Mike Garner, Head of Creative Strategy at Connelly Partners, approaches the same tension from a different angle. The Dublin Declaration on Global Education and the launch of ChatGPT happened within days of each other in November 2022 — two responses to the same underlying crisis of complexity, contested truth, and fraying social cohesion. His argument is precise: AI can process information and transmit understanding, but it cannot build comprehension — the kind that integrates knowledge with values, context, and the slow work of judgment. Every time a learner outsources evaluation to a machine, that muscle weakens. The real threat is not that AI will replace teachers. It is that we will voluntarily abandon the capacities that education exists to develop.
Together, these two essays do something the existing international frameworks — from the Council of Europe to UNESCO to the OECD — tend to presuppose rather than supply: they provide the philosophical foundation. Not as abstraction, but as a practical guide to the decisions policymakers are already making, often without realizing what they are choosing. The frameworks are necessary. But they are not enough. Chapter 3 argues that the movements, communities of practice, and decades of accumulated work in Global Education may be our most underused resource for navigating what AI actually demands of us.
The Readings
The Future of Critical Thinking
By Mike Garner, Head of Creative Strategy, Connelly Partners
Global Education’s Essential Role in an AI-saturated World
“People rarely change their minds because an algorithm tells them they’re wrong. They change through relationships, through dialogue, through the experience of being genuinely heard before being challenged.”
Monster or Messiah?
By Liam Wegimont, Executive Director at Global Education Network Europe
What Education is For and the Legal Framework Worldwide
“Academic excellence without a critical perspective reinforces existing hierarchies. Personal development without social consciousness can produce fulfilled individuals who never question the systems around them. Social integration without transformation produces competent participants in unjust systems.”
