Are we letting a monster or saviour into the classroom?

Examining Sal Khan’s confidence in artificial intelligence.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A board of experts sit at a table against a conference backdrop.

Sal Khan, left, at an AI summit.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

I've watched enough dystopian movies to know that there are lots of reasons to be nervous about the rise of the machines. Whether it’s the Terminator universe where the internet becomes sentient and creates autonomous robots to eradicate humanity, Neo battling an artificial intelligence that enslaves humans in The Matrix, or Will Smith fending off helper robots bent on taking over the planet in I, Robot, technological advances often fuel an array of nightmare scenarios. As if to make matters worse, science fiction has an uncanny knack for becoming science fact – I think of how shows like Star Trek accurately foretold mobile phones, wearable tech and virtual assistants. The line between imagined catastrophe and reality might be thinner than we might like to admit.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised then, that our creative industries are sending out dire warnings about the impact of the latest breakthrough technology - Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the middle of the industrial revolution, and Godzilla in the dawn of the nuclear era, dystopian fiction is par for the course of scientific advancement. It all stems, I believe, from our deep human response to the unknown – the fear instinct. But I have recently come across a surprising new voice of reassurance in Sal Khan’s book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).

Khan’s book comes recommended by Bill Gates - a reliably voracious reader and one of the founding fathers of the global information technology revolution. But Khan also has his own excellent credentials. From tutoring his niece online using a simple online drawing programme called Yahoo Doodle, he began creating YouTube videos and soon amassed over 450 million views. This led to his creation of the now world-renowned Khan Academy which has revolutionised online education. By 2023, it had more than 155 million registered users, with students spending billions of hours of learning on the platform.

Teachers are concerned that AI could undermine their expertise, much like satellite navigation diminished the skills of London Black Cab drivers.

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It seems to me that AI has the potential to upend the Khan Academy business model, however Khan does not take the opportunity to discredit AI or even to highlight its dangers in a bid to reinforce the advantages of his existing products. Nor does he buy into the doom and fearmongering about the impact of digital technologies on young minds, as Jonathan Haidt does in his recent bestselling book Anxious Generation. Instead, he writes a hopeful and imaginative book on AI’s potential for further transforming education for good.

Khan’s perspective comes amidst great fear in educational circles that generative AI will mean the end of education. Students can currently ask ChatGPT to generate an outline for them for an essay, suggest copy, check grammar and accuracy, offer improvements, translations, and factchecks, as well as write a conclusion, edit for wordcount, add footnote references and more. Indeed, entire books available for sale on Amazon have been allegedly written solely by AI. Teachers and lecturers are understandably concerned about the potential for plagiarism. If teachers are no longer able to discern what a student has written for themselves and what a computer has generated, the assessment process becomes meaningless.

Teachers are concerned that AI could undermine their expertise, much like satellite navigation diminished the skills of London Black Cab drivers. After years of mastering 'The Knowledge'—an arduous and demanding process requiring exceptional memory and recall—this once-essential qualification was rendered almost obsolete. New drivers now need little more than a GPS and an Uber account to compete, a shift that highlights how quickly hard-earned skills can become irrelevant in the face of technological advances. Many teachers fear a similar fate as AI continues to encroach on their domain.

While AI may not be the evil monster that will destroy us, neither is it the perfect saviour that will solve all society’s ills.

Khan offers an important alternative view. He sees the possibility that AI could, for example, help coach students on essay writing. By reading work, marking it and suggesting improvements, AI could not only save the teacher valuable time but help students take their work to an even higher level.

Khan offers a similar hopeful alternative to those who blame digital technology advances for the crisis in young person’s mental health. What if AI could help offer coping mechanisms, coaching and tailored advice that can help improve the mental health of students? His vision for the Khan academy virtual assistant ‘”Khanmigo” reminded me of BayMax from Disney’s Big Hero 6 – the large inflatable, huggable robot with a calm, compassionate and loyal personality, highly committed to every aspect of his user’s wellbeing.

Amid voices that demonise AI, Khan’s is a useful antidote, however I wonder if he has gone too far. While AI may not be the evil monster that will destroy us, neither is it the perfect saviour that will solve all society’s ills. Understatement is not Khan’s strong point. Instead, sometimes he becomes so carried away in excitement that I feel his book begins to sound like an infomercial for his own, current and future products.

I wish that Khan had taken a slightly different tack – no less inspiring about the potential of AI, but also recognising its limits. After all education is as much about transformation as it is about information. It should lead to character formation as much as skill acquisition. Emphasising these aspects of moral and perhaps even spiritual mentorship, we can see that education remains irreplaceably human.

AI has huge potential to help and to hinder us in our educative responsibilities to the next generation– and so questions remain – not if AI will change our world, but how. We need to ask not just what benefits it could bring, but who it could benefit most usefully.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.