A teacher wrote in The Times this month that he can no longer tell a pupil’s essay from a machine’s. He finds it worrying. He is right to. But the worry he names points to a more useful question than the one he asks.

Harry Hudson asks how we stop pupils handing their thinking to AI. Fair question. Here is a better one. What are we doing to build the kind of thinking a machine cannot fake?

Because this is the part most people miss about AI. It rewards whoever brings the most to it. Feed a model a dull prompt and you get dull writing back. Feed it a sharp idea, a clear point of view, a sense of what good looks like, and it turns into a useful tool. The difference is not technical. It is human. It is judgement. It is taste. It is having an original thought in the first place, and knowing
whether the thing in front of you is any good.

That capacity is not something a child either has or does not. It grows with use. And it grows most reliably in the lessons we have spent fifteen years cutting back. Creative arts provision in English schools has fallen by more than 40% in that time. The subjects that teach children to make decisions, weigh options and start again have been pushed to the edge of the timetable.

Look at what a child actually does when they write a song about the Victorians, design a set, or stage a scene. They make hundreds of small decisions. They judge what works. They begin again when it does not. That is thinking. Not the recall of facts, which a machine does better than any of us. The harder kind. Choosing. Shaping. Deciding.

Hudson is right that we cannot ban our way out of this. He is right that the answer will come from classrooms, not committees. But the answer is not only about rewriting homework. It is about what we put in front of children to begin with. If we want young people who can use AI rather than hide behind it, we have to develop the human capacities that let them.

Originality. Judgement. The patience to make something and the nerve to make it again. These are not soft skills. They decide who directs the machine and who is directed by it. AI does not make creativity less valuable. It makes it the thing worth having. And the creative arts are the strongest tool we have for building it. Not as a reward at the end of a hard week. As a way of teaching and learning, held to the same standard as everything else in the school.

Hudson closes by asking us to think for ourselves, in all our humanity. We would go one step further. Let us build that humanity on purpose, in every classroom, and start now.

In response to Harry Hudson, “Education urgently needs overarching strategy for AI”, The Times, 8 June 2026:

https://www.thetimes.com/article/3b6cc15e-1bed-49a1-bd8e-e74e7ec23dc7