Why education cannot be automated: Enactive pedagogy, AI, and the crisis of meaning

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly presented as a transformative force in education. This article argues that the challenge posed by AI is not primarily technological but pedagogical and onto-epistemological. We contend that the growing appeal of AI as an educational agent stems less from the intrinsic capabilities of the technology than from its compatibility with cognitivist and instructional models that conceive learning as information processing, teaching as knowledge transmission, and educational quality as optimization. Drawing on enactivism, radical enactivism, and extensive enactivism, we develop an alternative account in which learning emerges through embodied action, structural coupling, and participatory sense-making within sociomaterial environments. From this perspective, educational automation constitutes an ontological illusion because it abstracts learning from the embodied, relational, and lived conditions through which meaning, agency, and responsibility emerge. We argue that the principal risk of educational AI lies not in replacing teachers, but in progressively redefining education according to those dimensions of learning that computational systems can represent, predict, and optimize, thereby obscuring the experiential foundations of human learning. Rather than rejecting AI, we propose a shift from AI for Instruction toward AI for Embodiment, where artificial intelligence is designed to expand embodied participation, structural coupling, and human agency within meaningful educational ecologies.