Steven Zhao

This draft aims to examine and problematize the institutional and educational responses that have recently developed and ostensibly ‘matured’ from early binary responses of AI panic or excitement. Such responses – which I dub as education’s ‘middle path’ – are defined by a shared optimism that seeks to integrate AI and existing educational practices or principles in different ways. I argue that these middle paths, although ostensibly integrative, practical, or even holistic, are problematic insofar as they hold several reformative assumptions that are no longer viable in the age of AI. Much of this is attributable to an implicit conflation between pre-AI educational technologies and AI itself, particularly with respect to how they affect institutional deterrence structures for performance and the epistemology of assessments in education.

Education in recent years has witnessed an increasing involvement in the conversations regarding anti-oppressive practice and contemplation, particularly as foundations for pedagogy and curricular design. Naturally, both discourses have intersected with each other through the attempts at their integration, potentially leading toward new practices of enhanced educational impact. This chapter serves as a deliberate reflection and elaboration upon the nature and potential implications of their integration. As both discourses reflect valuable approaches and ideas, it is important to carefully examine and approach their integration to ensure that the value of each perspective is preserved as well as enriched in its power to educatively stimulate meaningful learning in the classroom. In order for such an educative situation to emerge, I argue that the integration should be defined by a sustained friction and differentiation between each perspective. By sustaining the friction, each perspective preserves their power to illuminate alternative possibilities in understanding the self and the world for the other. The educative value of such friction rests within its power to carry students onto a journey of continuous learning without settling upon finalized answers. Ultimately, I conclude that this friction is made possible and sustained by being embodied as the very self of the teacher.

This paper reframes artificial intelligence (AI) not merely as a disruptive tool in education but as a revelatory event that exposes structural features intrinsic to education itself. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis, education is conceptualized as a self-reproducing system governed by internally generated codes and communication. While such systems are adaptive, their effectiveness depends on how well their epistemological criteria map the phenomena they claim to measure. In education, this mapping is compromised: the system operates on empirical proxies (e.g., assignments, exams) to approximate inaccessible phenomena such as learning. This results in operational falsity, wherein education functions as if it assesses learning while actually evaluating its proxies. This falsity is sustained through two conditions: 1). indiscernibility, the inability to distinguish between learning, strategy, and cheating; and 2). hypocrisy, the demand that students demonstrate authentic learning through performative artefacts. Together, these conditions institutionally embed incentive structures that privilege optimized performance over deep learning while concealing this misalignment. AI disrupts this concealment by lowering the cost of producing high-quality, seemingly authentic artefacts, amplifying the exploitability of indiscernibility and fulfilling hypocritical demands. It reveals that these limitations are not external threats but were at the very heart of education from its institutional start.

This chapter examines the nature of social media and digital networks as an evolutionary force of human intelligence. Specifically, I argue such networks signal a transition into a digital existence potentially marked by a genre of sociality and communication that opposes Dewey’s conception of democracy as a ‘continuous and adaptive growth’ of inquiry and learning. By the communicative mechanisms of digital networks and properties, human experiences can be increasingly ‘cleansed’ of the entropic elements and risks of our sociality. Yet, this perpetuates a fragmentation of collective intelligence, whereby social encounters lose the necessary inescapability of mutual reconciliation to negotiatively generate and readapt shared meanings and truths. Drawing from a Hegelian concern for recognition as a central principle of democracy and its educational implications, I conclude that our digital futures ought to emphasize a pedagogy of recognitive struggle to sustain the very adaptive force of our growing intelligence.

My aim in this paper is to elaborate upon the specific and necessary existential situation to which this educational ideal (in sustaining the meaningful learning and curriculum) manifests – particularly in the context of the teacher-student relationship. My discussion is largely informed by philosopher John Russon’s account of dialectical phenomenology in addressing our existential situation as constituted by a perpetual “hermeneutical pressure.” This hermeneutical pressure occurs during the mutual confrontation between a self-consciousness that recognizes the equal existential weight of other self-consciousnesses. And that such recognition harbours a pressure that compels a reconciliation between different self-consciousness as somehow all constitutive as a “center of desires” and its experienced worlds—such that the process towards reconciliation is the meaningful self. Such an account is illuminating for educational discourse, as the relational situation between the teacher and student is often propelled (or hindered) by this very “pressure” to reconcile the power differentials of centers of desires and the existential worlds that stand in between them.

In this essay, I examine pedagogical approaches through the discourse of the authentic conception of the self. I argue that approaches inclining towards student-centered and anti-oppressive practices reflect fundamental conceptual conditions of the authentic self. Such educationally proliferated conceptions of authenticity, however, can fundamentally enact a stunted condition of liberal democracy. This can occur on the basis that 1). the authentic self fails to intersubjectively constitute itself and that 2). it is precisely the intersubjective constitution that facilitates liberal democracy as an adaptive eternal dialectical process. Ultimately, liberal democracy can be restored insofar as authenticity is educationally reclaimed dialectically.

This article examines the popular journalistic discourses on the terroristic actions and ideological beliefs of Brenton Tarrant as a way to illuminate the problematic ways in which the notions of radicalization and extremism of rightism are framed. I argue that the journalistic discourses implicitly frame radicalization and extremism as isolated standalone phenomena in terms of their ideas and ideological proponents. This framing is problematic because it stimulates a practical solution of suppression and a moral reaction of condemnation that serve to inadvertently fuel the growth of radicalization towards extremist attitudes and violence. Therefore, through my elaboration, I aim to lead the discussion towards a reframing of radicalization and extremism as not only standalone phenomena but also inherently interactive social processes. Such reframing carries important educational implications. I conclude that the educational role in the face of problematic discourses on radical rightism is to ensure that the classroom understands radicalization as a shared and interactive social process rather than as only an individual outcome. It is through such understanding that the educational approaches can then optimally resist radicalization and extremism through the acknowledgement of the social importance of inclusive dialogues.

In this essay Steven Zhao provides an existential-phenomenological account of radicalization and extremism. This elaboration is in response to what Zhao perceives to be the two problematically dominant perspectives of discourse on radicalization: the ideational perspective and the psychological perspective. The ideational perspective is risky because it offers an incomplete understanding of radicalization by presuming that it is the expression of cognitive errors. The psychological perspective, on the other hand, excessively individualizes radicalization as an exceptional psychological aberration that can riskily result in instructivistic preventative approaches in education. Zhao proposes the existential-phenomenological elaboration as a supplemental articulation of radicalization that has potential to address the issues associated with these two dominant perspectives. According to this elaboration, ideological extremism is a relational phenomenon that constitutes a “dysfunctional” structure of intersubjectivity. Applying interrelated notion of subjectivity and intersubjectivity illuminates radicalization in a way that both widens the scope of ideational attributions/corrections and transcends the individualistic confines of psychopathology/psychological resilience. Ultimately, this elaboration seeks to enrich educational approaches to addressing radicalization such that preventative strategies are informed by the relational foundations intrinsic to both cognitive and psychological motivations of extremist behaviors and beliefs.

In this chapter, we explore the implications and meaning of therapization in education. Generally, therapization in education means the integration or involvement of psychological dimensions of students in the learning process. Because of its growing trends throughout educational approaches, various discussions are emerging as both promotive and cautionary responses. Our elaboration frames its trends into two opposing directions-'strong' and 'weak' therapization. Strong therapization approaches student emotionality as warranting educational accommodations for realizing their intrinsic learnedness. Weak therapization regards emotionality as communicating psychological health that should be supported to ensure effective learning performance. We argue that the essential therapizing value in education is to incorporate both directions into a reflexive tension. Educational moments ought to wrestle with the complexities of both recognizing student inner lives as a source of significant learnedness and committing to shared scholastic standards as references for growth. We illustrate such understanding through story and theory-examining classroom examples of ethical tensions between teacher-student encounters and articulating its broader structural implications with regards to the meaning of education/learning. Conceptually, we anchor the elaboration on Charles Taylor's discussion of 'authenticity' to illuminate the important cultural foundations and educational future of therapization.