Educating in a World Without Closure

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

We are entering a world where the smallest and cheapest of tools can destabilise the strongest of systems. The latest Global Peace Index makes the point that a few hundred dollars spent on a drone can undo a multimillion-dollar tank. Conflicts often no longer resolve into victories or peace settlements; they drag on. Analysts now speak of “forever wars,” a condition of permanent instability created by the spread of inexpensive, adaptable technologies.

Education faces its own version of this. Generative AI, like drones, collapses the barriers to entry. A free tool can bypass years of carefully designed curricula or assessments. The pattern is familiar: institutions scramble to adapt to technologies that spread faster than they can be governed.

The analogy is imperfect but instructive. Both in war and in education, this type of technology shifts the balance of power, redistributes agency, and multiplies complexity. Instead of a stable equilibrium, where systems return to balance after a shock, we see either unstable equilibria—where each small disturbance drives further away from balance—or dynamic equilibria, where institutions must live within a state of continual fluctuation.

The critical distinction lies in intent. In war, the cheap drone is a tool of asymmetric conflict, deployed to destabilise and destroy. In education, generative AI is primarily a tool of asymmetric creation or completion. Its user seeks efficiency and augmentation, not the dismantling of the institution. The turbulence that follows is an emergent, unintended consequence.

This distinction dictates the response. The military seeks to eliminate or neutralise the threat. In education, the challenge is integration and developing practices that make learning and teaching durable amid ongoing flux.

The “resolution” educators and policymakers seek, whether clarity of learning outcomes or institutional stability, remains elusive. What emerges instead are rolling cycles of uptake, resistance, redesign, and re‑negotiation.

Where the very idea of closure becomes elusive, learning and teaching shift in meaning: education must be reconceived less as control or management of turbulence and more as an ethic of sustaining relationality (fostered through practices including trust building, collaborative projects and the use of GenAI to support dialogue).

This may enable us to view the fluctuations as signs of a stable rhythm of continual adaption, opening a space to imagine ourselves as capable of moving with the patterns rather than fighting them.