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Abstract In today’s world of Generative AI (GenAI), the challenges in education are often reduced to simple questions: ‘How do we stop cheating?’ or ‘How can we work faster?’ However, this paper poses a deeper question: When machines can speak and write for us, what does it mean for a human to think? Drawing on years of experience teaching English, the author observes that schooling often transforms learning into calculative thinking—a relentless pursuit of standard answers, grades, and future job prospects. This trend encourages students to treat language as a warehouse of information that can be easily outsourced to AI. Borrowing from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, this paper argues that thinking is not just about producing an output; it is a way of being in the world and ‘dwelling’ within language. The article explores how modern education distorts our sense of time, causes our judgment to wither into mere calculation, and allows GenAI to fragment our language. It reveals how technology subtly pressures us to become as efficient and predictable as the machines we use. Finally, the author proposes a new educational stance called answerability without exhaustiveness. This approach calls for ‘meditative thinking,’ reimagining education as a journey to discover our connection to the world, rather than a factory for producing compliant text.
Shengmeng (Summer) Cui (Sun,) studied this question.