Silvio Nocilla
2026
Abstract
This article examines a distinction that has quietly slipped out of educational conversation: the difference between teaching and educating. Drawing on twenty-five years of personal experience in interactive and educational technologies, the author argues that ongoing debates about technology in education — from social media to artificial intelligence (AI) — are symptoms of a much deeper problem. Education has gradually narrowed itself into a vehicle for qualification and commercial interest, losing sight of its broader and more important purpose: forming independent, critically aware, and morally grounded human beings. Informed by the work of Peters (1966), Freire (1970), Biesta (2022), and the concerns raised by UNESCO and the World Economic Forum (2025), the article calls for a rebalancing — one that embraces technology without surrendering the human heart of education.
1. Introduction: Twenty-Five Years of Watching Education Stand Still
Over the course of twenty-five years working in teaching and professional training — specialising in interactive and educational technologies — I have witnessed education pass through several cycles of transformation. Or, more precisely, cycles of resistance followed by reluctant adaptation. The subject matter I teach sits at the intersection of technology and learning, which has allowed me to observe closely many institutional discussions about whether, when, and how technology should be integrated into education.
What has struck me most is not how rapidly technology has changed — it has changed enormously — but how rigidly the educational response has remained the same: resist, panic, then adapt, but rarely reflect.
What I have consistently witnessed is a pattern that repeats itself with almost predictable regularity: resistance, panic, and eventual reluctant adaptation — but rarely genuine reflection. When social media emerged, the institutional answer was to call it a distraction and ban phones from classrooms. When YouTube and digital media became part of everyday life, the conversation turned to screen time and cognitive harm. And now, artificial intelligence — generative AI in particular — has taken centre stage: AI yes, AI no, AI when, AI how. The anxiety is familiar. The cycle is the same.
But here is what I have come to believe after all these years: the technology has never really been the problem. What we keep missing — cycle after cycle — is something far more fundamental. We have become so focused on the tools of education that we have lost sight of its purpose. We have, somewhere along the way, confused teaching with educating, and in doing so, we have quietly let go of one of the most important things education is supposed to do.
2. Teaching and Educating Are Not the Same Thing
This is not just a matter of words. The failure to distinguish between teaching and educating is a philosophical problem — and it has real consequences.
Peters (1966) was direct about the distinction. He argued that education is not simply instruction: it initiates learners into worthwhile forms of knowledge while cultivating understanding, rationality, and personal development. More pointedly, he contended that someone can be taught facts or procedures without being educated at all, because genuine education implies a transformation of the whole person — not merely the addition of information to an existing store.
That insight feels just as sharp today as it did sixty years ago. The difference, as I see it, is this:
• Teaching changes what a person knows or is able to do.
• Educating changes how a person thinks, behaves, judges, and lives.
Teaching is focused and intentional — a deliberate act of transmission aimed at a clear outcome. Educating is something bigger and harder to measure: it is about shaping the whole person, about how someone engages with ideas, how they treat other people, how they make sense of a world that is increasingly complicated and fast-moving. Teaching is the tool. Education is the goal.
The issue is not that teaching has become more prominent — it has always been at the core of schooling. The issue is that educating has been quietly dropped from the agenda, leaving teaching to carry a purpose it was never designed to carry on its own.
3. The Commercial Drift of Education
This did not happen by accident.
Over the past few decades, the purpose of education has been progressively reframed. Schooling is now widely understood — by policymakers, institutions, and often by students themselves — as a pipeline from classroom to labour market. Success is measured in qualifications, employment rates, and rankings. The question driving curriculum design is less often “what kind of person do we want to form?” and more often “what skills does the economy need?”
Biesta (2022) gives us a useful way to name what has been lost. He argues that education has always served three purposes: qualification (knowledge and skills), socialisation (becoming part of existing cultural and civic life), and subjectification (becoming an independent, responsible individual capable of thinking and acting for oneself). His worry — and I share it — is that modern education has become almost entirely consumed by qualification, squeezing out subjectification almost entirely. When that happens, education stops forming people and starts producing them.
UNESCO has said something similar for years. It consistently warns against educational systems driven by commercial logic, insisting that education is a human right and a public good — not a product. When it comes to technology and AI specifically, UNESCO does not argue against using these tools; it argues that they must be integrated with a human-centred and ethical purpose, not deployed simply because they are efficient or profitable.
I understand these are not new concerns. And I am not calling for a return to some imagined golden age of education — the rigid, hierarchical classrooms of the past did not serve students well either. But something genuinely valuable has been lost in the push toward qualification and commercial relevance. The capacity to think critically, to respect others, to evaluate information, to behave ethically — these are not nice-to-haves to be squeezed in around the edges of a busy curriculum. They are the point.
4. The Unfiltered Information Age and the Abdication of Educational Responsibility
The consequences of this drift are serious enough in any era. In this one, they are urgent.
We live in a world of relentless, unfiltered information. Social media platforms run twenty-four hours a day, feeding content of wildly varying quality — and reliability — directly into the minds of young people, with no editorial standard, no pedagogical intent, and no obligation to truth. This is the environment our students are growing up in. It is the environment shaping their beliefs, their self-image, their sense of what is real.
And yet education, which should be equipping people to navigate exactly this kind of environment, has largely stepped back from the task.
Consider the social media influencer. Many influencers have no formal expertise, no ethical accountability, and no particular qualification to be shaping public opinion. And yet they do — powerfully, persistently, at scale. Why? Because they understand engagement, trust, and storytelling in ways that formal education has never managed to apply to itself. Meanwhile, educators — trained professionals with years of experience and genuine knowledge — find themselves constrained by bureaucratic curricula and assessment frameworks that leave little room for the kind of relationship-based, values-driven human formation that actually changes how people think.
If education were doing its job — helping students filter information, question sources, think before they act, and form independent judgements — the power of these voices would be far more limited. The problem is not that influencers exist. The problem is that education has not given people the tools to evaluate them.
5. Critical Consciousness: What Freire Knew and We Have Forgotten
Paulo Freire understood this long before social media existed.
Writing more than fifty years ago, Freire (1970) identified what he called the banking model of education — a system in which students are treated as passive containers into which teachers deposit pre-packaged knowledge. His argument was that this model does not educate; it domesticates. Genuine education, for Freire, must cultivate conscientização — critical consciousness — giving learners the capacity to question, reflect, and engage with the world as active, thinking agents, rather than simply absorbing and reproducing what they are told.
Freire’s original critique was rooted in the politics of oppression and liberation. But the educational insight is universal, and it has never felt more relevant. The banking model he described has not gone away. In some ways, technology has given it new life. When any fact can be retrieved in seconds from a search engine, and when AI can generate a coherent essay on almost any topic in under a minute, the pure transmission of information has been effectively automated. If that has been the primary function of education, then education — in the banking sense — is becoming obsolete.
But if education means what Freire intended — developing the capacity to think critically, to question, to reason, to engage as an active and responsible member of society — then it does not become less important in the age of AI. It becomes more important. Students today do not need more information. They have access to more information than any generation before them. What they need is the ability to evaluate it, contextualise it, and act on it wisely. That is educating. And it is precisely what we have been deprioritising.
6. Technology Is Not the Problem
I want to be clear about what this article is arguing — and what it is not.
Technology is not the problem. Social media is not the enemy. AI is not a threat to education. These are tools, and the value of any tool depends entirely on how it is used, and to what end.
The World Economic Forum (2025) is unambiguous on this point: critical thinking is one of the most essential human skills for the decades ahead. As AI and digital media become more embedded in every area of life, the capacities that remain distinctly human — weighing evidence, challenging assumptions, exercising independent judgement — become more valuable, not less. The right response to AI in education is not restriction or alarm. It is a renewed commitment to developing precisely the qualities that AI cannot replicate.
The question has never really been whether to use AI in education. Of course we should. Students are going to live and work in an AI-saturated world, and preparing them to navigate that world is an educational responsibility.
Why not use AI to educate students about AI? Why not use it to explore questions of truth, bias, ethics, and human responsibility? Why not use it as a prompt for exactly the kind of critical thinking that Freire advocated and that Biesta (2022) would recognise as subjectification? These are the conversations that form autonomous thinkers. They are the conversations education should be having — and largely is not.
7. Conclusion: Rebalancing the Purpose of Education
The argument of this article is, at its core, a simple one.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is that we have allowed the most important purpose of education — forming thinking, ethical, socially responsible human beings — to be crowded out by a narrower concern with qualification and commercial relevance.
Could it be that we are placing greater emphasis on teaching and therefore, in any meaningful institutional sense, neglecting educating? The difference matters enormously, because in the space that education has overlooked, other forces have moved in — social media, influencers, algorithmic content — and they are doing the educating instead. They are doing it without values, without critical frameworks, and without the slightest concern for the wellbeing or development of the people they are reaching.
The answer is not idealising the past. It is not a rejection of technology or AI or the demands of a modern economy. Students deserve to be prepared for the world they are going to live in, with the knowledge and skills their chosen paths require. That matters. But qualification without subjectification — to use Biesta’s terms — produces people who know how to perform tasks without knowing how to think about them, question them, or take responsibility for them.
We need to teach. And we need to educate. Restoring that balance is not idealism. It is the most practical thing education could do — because the alternative is a generation whose sense of the world, of truth, of values, and of themselves is being formed entirely by systems that were built for engagement and profit, not for human flourishing.
References
Biesta, G. (2022) World-Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Peters, R.S. (1966) Ethics and Education. George Allen and Unwin.
UNESCO (2023) Technology in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms? UNESCO Publishing. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/2023 (Accessed: 8 July 2026).
World Economic Forum (2025) The Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025 (Accessed: 8 July 2026).
Appendix: AI Use Disclosure
In accordance with emerging best practice guidelines for academic and professional writing, the author discloses the following:
The intellectual content of this article — including its arguments, positions, analysis, and conclusions — was conceived, developed, and authored entirely by Silvio Nocilla. All ideas expressed are the author’s own and are grounded in his professional experience and engagement with the cited literature.
Artificial intelligence tools were used solely for the purposes of grammar checking, language refinement, and stylistic improvement of the original draft. No AI tool was used to generate, originate, or substantively alter the arguments, ideas, or academic content of this article. The author retains full intellectual and academic responsibility for all content published herein.
This disclosure is consistent with the guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, 2023), which state that AI tools may not be listed as authors and that their use must be transparently declared. It also aligns with the position of the World Economic Forum (2025) and UNESCO regarding the ethical and transparent use of AI as an assistive, not generative, instrument in human-led work.
Reference
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (2023) Authorship and AI Tools. COPE. Available at: https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author (Accessed: 8 July 2026).