Critical education, generative artificial intelligence and the tyranny of freedom: a critique of modern ‘technocracy’

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Article / Journal

Author(s) / editor(s):
Cristina Costa & Mark Murphy

Year: 2025

Keywords: Gen-AI in education, Freirean critical pedagogy, learner autonomy
Language(s): English

Abstract:
The paper critically examines Gen-AI as a supposed liberator of learning, focusing on claims that it enhances temporal efficiency and intellectual freedom. Drawing on Freirean critical pedagogy, it argues that this efficiency-oriented “freedom” contributes little to the development of critical thinking and reasoning, since learner autonomy is a socially constructed, collective process rather than an individual, tool-based capacity. Through discussion of Freire’s concepts of problematisation, critical dialogue, and acts of knowing, the paper questions Gen-AI’s emancipatory promise and proposes alternatives to what Freire termed the “tyranny of freedom” in educational technologies.

https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939X.2025.2547728

Post created by: Virginia Signorini

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