Tired of hearing how AI is killing education? Try the opposite.

Every time I get stone-walled in conversations about AI and education reform, I return to one interview: my seminal exchange with Fr. Benigno Beltran. In a sector drenched in bureaucratic caution and academic gatekeeping, listening to Fr. Ben is like inhaling oxygen after years of stale air. The Philippine education system insists that change must be incremental, procedural, “carefully studied.” Meanwhile, in the heart of Smokey Mountain, one of the last places the establishment expects to find innovation, an educator is already building a future we pretend is still up for debate.

Education is in crisis, not metaphorically but structurally. This crisis is not only about poor performance in global assessments (though ranking 79 out of 79 in reading comprehension should set off alarms). It is also about the intellectual stagnation of our frameworks. We still worship at the altar of Bloom’s taxonomy, a model crafted for an industrial age classroom: linear, hierarchical, sequential. But our learners inhabit a world that is non-linear, multimodal, and dynamic. Bloom assumed knowledge acquisition happens like climbing a staircase. Today’s digital natives learn more like navigating an open-world game, exploring, testing, failing, iterating. Bloom’s tidy pyramid collapses under the weight of contemporary cognition.

Yet higher education clings to it as though pedagogy has no version updates.

This inertia is mirrored in universities’ relationship with AI. Professors often prefer to dunk on AI, decrying hallucinations, complaining about plagiarism, condemning it as a shortcut rather than examining its potential for empowerment. The tone is moralistic, even panicked. Instead of asking how AI might enrich instruction, extend the reach of learning, or democratize opportunities, many academics choose to police it. Fear has become the default stance.

And it is fear that has turned universities into fortresses rather than laboratories.

Inside the academy, AI is framed as threat. Outside the gates, it is a force multiplier, a tool for radical empowerment. This disconnect is the essence of the problem: the people most responsible for shaping the future of learning are the ones most terrified of the tools shaping the future of everything else. Universities should be leading the transformation, not resisting it.

This is why Fr. Ben’s work stands in such stark, and frankly embarrassing, contrast to the formal system. While committees schedule multi-year “studies” on the feasibility of integrating AI into curricula, Fr. Ben is already deploying AI tools where many assume it would fail: among out-of-school youth, learners who have been systematically failed by the mainstream.

The Alternative Learning System (ALS) is the Department of Education’s lifeline for those who fell through the cracks, dropouts, working youth, those displaced by poverty or circumstance. It is the last stop before society writes them off. Yet it is here that Fr. Ben engineered one of the most compelling modern experiments in AI-driven education.

Armed with grant support, donated devices, and sheer audacity, he digitized modules, gamified learning, and embraced virtual reality. These were not just gadgets thrown at problems; they were strategic interventions grounded in a new theory of learning: that digital natives possess competencies the formal system neither recognizes nor values. While traditional classrooms label them distracted, Fr. Ben recognized their ability to sustain focus for hours in immersive environments like Minecraft or Mobile Legends. Attention is not the issue, relevance is.

He proved it. Forty ALS learners, kids often dismissed as academically deficient, wrote over 11,000 lines of code in five days using Minecraft Education Edition and Hour of Code. No coding background. No JavaScript. No formal instruction. Just a challenge and the digital spaces they intuitively understand.

Try getting the same “deficient” learners to parse a dense textbook chapter and their performance plummets. But that is precisely the point: the system keeps insisting the learners must adapt to the pedagogy, when in reality the pedagogy must adapt to the learners.

Then came the microcredential revolution: IBM SkillsBuild courses on AI, cybersecurity, data analytics. Fr. Ben simply sent the links, explained that microcredentials would be tracked, and set clear stakes. The youth completed 20 hours of coursework in three days. These same students score poorly on standardized tests designed around reading load and memorization, but when engaged through digital modalities, they perform like top-tier tech apprentices.

Fr. Ben’s work is not a pilot. It is a proof of concept. It tells us bluntly that a different approach is possible, and that the sinking ship of Philippine education is sinking because we insist on repairing it with the same tools that caused the holes.

Meanwhile, institutions continue to treat AI as a contagion instead of a catalyst. Professors clutch rubrics while students clutch smartphones that contain more learning potential than any syllabus. Universities enforce prohibitions while gig workers use AI to earn. Policymakers invoke precaution while marginalized learners in Smokey Mountain use AI to code, create, and credential themselves into relevance.

What is missing? Courage. The courage to admit the old models are broken. The courage to let AI augment rather than threaten academic identity. The courage to reimagine pedagogy not as a hierarchy but as an ecosystem. And the courage to listen to innovators like Fr. Ben, who are doing the work the rest of us only theorize about.

In the end, one line echoes louder than any academic argument:

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

And in a humble ALS center in Smokey Mountain, Fr. Ben is doing it, every single day.

 

About Me:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

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