Jamaica has entered the artificial intelligence (AI) age with a familiar educational questions disguised as a new technological ones. We are asking whether students should use AI, whether it will weaken learning, whether teachers will lose control, whether examinations remain trustworthy, and whether machines will eventually do too much of the thinking.

But beneath those questions lies an older struggle. For more than two centuries, the real battle in education has not simply been about who gets into the classroom. It has been about who gets access to intellectual power, who controls that access, and what people are expected to do with the knowledge they acquire.

That was true when 19-century elites debated the education of the poor. It was true when former slaves sought literacy after Emancipation. And it remains true as AI places extraordinary intellectual assistance within reach of ordinary students.

The comparison must be made carefully. AI is not equivalent to Emancipation from slavery. But the underlying educational tension is strikingly similar. Between 1800 and 1870, the question across much of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean increasingly became less about education vs ignorance and more about three things — curriculum, control, and purpose.

What should ordinary people learn? Who should decide? And what kind of person should education produce?

In Britain, Parliament began providing State assistance for elementary education in 1833. Yet education remained strongly connected to religious instruction, moral discipline, industriousness, and social order. The poor might be educated, but education was not necessarily intended to turn them into critics of the society into which they were born. Elsewhere, the pattern varied, but the underlying concern was similar. Schools could produce productive workers, loyal citizens, disciplined subjects, and morally respectable people.

The problem became much more acute in slave societies. In parts of the antebellum American South, teaching enslaved people to read was prohibited or severely restricted. Literacy was dangerous because slavery required not only control of the body but control of knowledge and interpretation.

After Emancipation, formerly enslaved people rapidly demonstrated that they understood education as more than preparation for work. They built schools, demanded teachers, raised funds, and treated literacy as part of freedom itself.

Jamaica faced the same contradiction. After Emancipation, missionary schools and imperial educational assistance expanded opportunities for formerly enslaved Jamaicans. But the plantocracy confronted an uncomfortable truth: Education might help create disciplined participants in a free-labour economy. It might also create people capable of questioning the assumptions upon which plantation society had rested. A person taught to read the
Bible might encounter passages concerning obedience. But that same reader might also encounter Exodus. Once people learn to read, those who teach them cannot completely determine what conclusions they will reach. That is why education has always been about power. And that brings us to AI.

AI has genuine potential to become one of the greatest educational equalisers available to a country such as Jamaica. A student with an Internet-connected device may now obtain explanations of difficult concepts, language assistance, examples, writing feedback, revision support, and something resembling individual tutoring. Historically, such support has disproportionately belonged to students whose families could afford better schools, books, tutors, and enrichment opportunities.

AI could help narrow that gap. But it could also deepen it.

A student with strong literacy, subject knowledge, and critical-thinking skills may know how to interrogate an AI response, test its accuracy, compare evidence, and reject nonsense. A weaker student may simply accept whatever appears on the screen. We could therefore reduce the digital divide while creating a new cognitive divide. That is why Jamaican education must move beyond the simplistic question: Did the student use AI?

The better question are: What happened to the student’s thinking because AI was used? Did it replace reasoning or deepen it? Did it merely produce an answer or help the learner formulate a better question? Did the student become more dependent upon the machine or more capable of recognising when the machine was wrong? These distinctions matter.

We could easily produce a generation exceptionally skilled at generating essays, presentations, summaries, and answers while becoming progressively weaker at constructing independent arguments. That would be a new form of “just enough education” — impressive productivity without corresponding intellectual independence.

Jamaica must therefore reject two extremes. The first is panic: Attempting to ban AI from education as though students can permanently be returned to a pre-AI world. The second is surrender: Assuming that because AI produces impressive output, learning must therefore have occurred. Neither position is educationally serious.

AI should also never become an excuse to provide poorer children with machines instead of excellent teachers. Imagine the inequality: Affluent students receiving highly trained teachers plus AI, while students in under-resourced communities receive AI instead of highly trained teachers. That would not democratise education. It would digitise inequality.

The 19th-century educational questions of curriculum, control and purpose, therefore, need a fourth in the AI age — capability. What intellectual capacities must remain actively exercised by the human being?

Students must still learn to test evidence, recognise bias, understand opposing arguments, distinguish fact from assertion, tolerate uncertainty, change their minds when evidence demands it, and make ethical judgements.

AI can strengthen these capacities. It must never become their substitute. This is where Jamaica’s AI debate should now move. Our objective cannot simply be to produce students who know how to use AI. We must produce students intelligent enough to question AI.

Two centuries ago, some elites feared that education would teach ordinary people to question authority. Our danger today may be the reverse: That dependence upon AI could train people not to question authority enough.

The real challenge is therefore not whether Jamaica will allow students to use AI. They already will. The question is whether we will design an education system in which AI enlarges human reasoning, creativity, judgement and freedom — or one in which it quietly replaces them.

The deepest educational questions have remained remarkably constant from Emancipation to the age of algorithms: Who is allowed to think? And how freely are they allowed to do it?

Dudley McLean II is the Church Teachers’ College 2025 Diamond Jubilee alumni awardee for journalism and a graduate of Codrington College, Barbados. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or dm15094@gmail.com.