Author: Alejandro Díaz Garreta

  • Europe’s Soft Power and the Educational Question

    If American soft power weakens, a vacuum appears.
    The real question is whether Europe understands the nature of its own strength — and whether education is prepared to sustain it.

    In a recent reflection, I considered Europe’s responsibility in a world accelerated by technology. An editorial in Le Monde adds a geopolitical dimension to that same question.

    Philippe Bernard concludes his analysis of Donald Trump’s posture towards alliances with a revealing observation:

    “En sacrifiant le soft power américain, Donald Trump alimente l’impopularité de son propre pays (…) Mais il invite aussi les Européens à exercer leur propre soft power… ses valeurs humanistes et démocratiques, ses arts, sa culture, ses modes de vie, ses systèmes sociaux et ses libertés méritent d’être préservés, défendus et promus. L’offensive Trump pourrait y aider.” — Philippe Bernard, Le Monde, 15 February 2026

    The argument extends beyond American politics. When a dominant soft power weakens, space opens. China may expand economically, yet its political and cultural attractiveness within democratic societies remains limited. The deeper question concerns Europe itself: does it recognise the nature of its own influence?

    Europe’s strength has never been merely economic. It is civilisational. Humanism, the rule of law, artistic creation, institutional pluralism, democratic freedoms — these were built patiently over centuries. They are not abstractions. They are institutional achievements.

    And they are transmitted through education.

    Much of today’s strategic debate revolves around artificial intelligence, competitiveness and technological sovereignty. These matters are important. Yet Europe’s most durable strategic asset lies elsewhere: in normative leadership — in its capacity to shape standards, values and intellectual frameworks.

    Soft power does not begin in diplomacy. It begins in schools and universities.

    An education worthy of Europe must cultivate critical judgement, historical awareness, intellectual freedom balanced with responsibility, and the capacity to govern technology rather than be governed by it. Without such formation, values become decorative.

    External pressure may clarify identity. But identity requires cultivation.

    If Europe is to exercise its soft power, it will do so through the formation of free and responsible minds. That remains, fundamentally, an educational task.

  • AI didn’t destroy critical thinking. It exposed how fragile it already was

    AI as a Stress Test for Critical Thinking

    As both a classroom teacher and someone involved in institutional strategy, I find the current debate on AI in higher education revealing — and often overstated. Much of the public discussion assumes that generative tools have suddenly weakened intellectual rigour. A more careful examination suggests something different.

    Long before generative systems entered lecture theatres, many students struggled to analyse rigorously, argue coherently and transfer knowledge across contexts. AI did not create that fragility. It made it visible.

    A recent comparative study by the WISE–IIE Global Consortium reinforces this conclusion. AI is already embedded in academic life. Students use it. Faculty experiment with it. Employers expect fluency in it. Institutions that respond primarily with prohibition rather than governance risk strategic irrelevance.

    The central issue is therefore not whether to allow or ban AI.

    The more demanding question concerns the design of intellectual effort itself: what does our curriculum genuinely require from students?

    In the Spanish case study highlighted in the WISE–IIE report, AI was integrated through a dual model: AI-generated content followed by structured human review. The outcome was not cognitive decline, but measurable gains in reasoning and ethical reflection. Properly framed, AI functioned as cognitive scaffolding rather than as a substitute for judgment.

    An uncomfortable inference follows.

    If a task can be fully outsourced to a generative tool, perhaps it never required genuine critical thinking in the first place.

    In this sense, AI operates as a stress test for education systems. It compels us to reconsider how we assess learning, how we structure intellectual effort, and what we mean by competence in a world where information is abundant but judgment remains scarce.

    There was no lost golden age of critical thinking that AI has suddenly destroyed. What exists is a pedagogical weakness that can no longer remain hidden.

    The question is not whether AI will transform education.

    The question is whether we possess the clarity — and the courage — to transform education with it.

  • Technology, Humanism and the Purpose of Education

    The real challenge of artificial intelligence in education is not technical but human. The question is not how to optimise learning, but what kind of human beings education is meant to form.

    The most pressing challenge posed by artificial intelligence in education is not technical. It is human.

    Working in both the classroom and educational foundations, I increasingly observe that much of the debate revolves around optimisation: access, personalisation, efficiency, and scale. These are important considerations. Yet education has never been reducible to efficiency.

    Education concerns judgment, culture and personal formation. It shapes the intellectual and moral capacities through which individuals participate in society. When technological innovation becomes the primary lens through which education is understood, we risk narrowing its purpose.

    From a European humanistic perspective, this narrowing is particularly significant. Education in this tradition has never been confined to skills training. It is concerned with forming persons capable of freedom, responsibility and critical discernment. It is civilisational in scope.

    Technology can assist this project. It can expand access to knowledge, support individual pathways and augment intellectual work. But it cannot determine the ends of education. That remains a human and cultural question.

    Innovation becomes valuable only when it deepens understanding rather than substitutes for it, when it reinforces responsibility rather than displaces it, and when it strengthens critical judgment rather than bypasses it.

    The question, therefore, is not whether technology will shape the future of learning. It already does.

    The deeper question is whether we ensure that it remains ordered to the human purposes education is meant to serve.

    Technology should serve education — and education should serve the formation of free and responsible minds.

  • When the Architects of AI Begin to Hesitate

    A recent article by Ángel Jiménez de Luis in El Mundo reported the resignation of Mrinank Sharma, Head of AI Safety at Anthropic. Beyond the individual case, the episode reflects a broader symptom: even within the technology sector, a growing divide is emerging between enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and reflection on its consequences.

    This is not an abstract debate. New generative models are already transforming entire professions — from programming and marketing to consulting and administrative work. Some estimates suggest that large-scale automation of cognitive and administrative tasks will occur in the coming years. What we are witnessing is not incremental change but a profound economic and social reconfiguration.

    From an educational perspective, at least three urgent reflections follow.

    First, AI literacy can no longer be confined to instrumental use. Teaching students how to operate tools is insufficient. We must cultivate judgement, critical reasoning and a structured understanding of the social and ethical implications of these technologies.

    Second, the locus of human value is shifting. The competencies that resist automation — ethical discernment, genuine creativity, collaborative intelligence, leadership, and the capacity to interpret meaning — are becoming central. Education must therefore strengthen precisely those dimensions that machines cannot replicate.

    Third, educational institutions must become spaces for informed debate about technology and values, not merely sites for technological adoption. Integrating AI without considering its cultural and anthropological implications would be pedagogically superficial.

    Perhaps the most telling signal in this episode is not technological but cultural. When AI safety specialists step back and turn to philosophy or poetry, the gesture is symbolic. It suggests that technical mastery alone does not resolve deeper questions about direction, responsibility and human purpose.

    Education carries a historical responsibility at this moment. It must not only prepare individuals to coexist with artificial intelligence but also help preserve and cultivate what remains irreducibly human.

    The real question is not whether AI will transform society. It is whether our educational systems will retain the clarity — and the courage — to shape that transformation with judgement rather than surrender to it.

  • Institutions, Memory and the Meaning of Gran Vía 28

    Some buildings fulfil a function. Others embody an era. The Telefónica headquarters on Madrid’s Gran Vía belongs to the latter category.

    When inaugurated in the early 1930s, it was not merely Spain’s first skyscraper. It was a declaration of technological modernity by a country seeking to connect with the wider world. Architecture, engineering and national ambition converged at Gran Vía 28.

    Its history is not ornamental. During the Spanish Civil War, the building became a strategic communications hub and a civil refuge. This is not metaphor but documented fact. Writers such as Arturo Barea left testimony to scenes inseparable from the country’s moral memory. Few corporate headquarters have simultaneously served as critical infrastructure, human shelter and political symbol.

    In the decades that followed, those offices directed key processes in Spain’s contemporary transformation: the universalisation of telephone access, the modernisation of networks, the transition from a regulated monopoly to an open market, and later the international expansion that made Telefónica a major multinational, particularly in Latin America. To recount the history of Telefónica is, in many respects, to recount the economic and technological history of modern Spain.

    For that reason, the potential sale of the building cannot be reduced to a purely patrimonial decision. It is understandable that a company adapts its assets to new financial and operational logics. But treating such a move as a simple real estate transaction diminishes its significance.

    For that reason, the potential sale of the building cannot be reduced to a purely patrimonial decision. It is understandable that a company adapts its assets to new financial and operational logics. But treating such a move as a simple real estate transaction diminishes its significance.

    When a company relinquishes one of its foundational symbols, it does more than adjust its balance sheet. It redefines its relationship with its history. The uncomfortable — but necessary — question follows: can a centenarian institution afford to act as if its past were a burden rather than an asset?

    Telefónica has had achievements and controversies, successes and failures. For precisely that reason, it forms part of our shared history. Divesting Gran Vía 28 may be strategically defensible. Symbolically, however, it is not neutral.

    Buildings may change ownership. Memory, by contrast, demands to be acknowledged, cared for and transmitted. That responsibility does not trade on financial markets.

    This reflection is offered as a respectful tribute to the many individuals — in their finest and most difficult moments — who shaped Telefónica and whose work is part of our collective history.

  • The Adolescence of Technology: What Education Must Do Next

    In January 2026, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay titled The Adolescence of Technology. His central claim is disarmingly simple: artificial intelligence is advancing faster than our institutions, norms and collective capacity to govern it. We are living through a technological adolescence — rapid growth in capability, coupled with immature governance.

    If that diagnosis is correct, education is no longer peripheral to the debate; it becomes central.

    1. From tool use to critical technological literacy

    Education cannot confine itself to teaching how to use AI systems. Students must understand, at a conceptual level, how these systems function, where their limitations and biases lie, and the economic, social and ethical consequences they entail.

    Technological literacy must become critical literacy — embedded across the curriculum rather than confined to optional modules.

    2. Educating for uncertainty and complexity

    The impact of advanced technologies is systemic and difficult to predict. This requires an educational shift: greater systems thinking, greater decision-making under uncertainty, and greater engagement with open-ended problems in which trade-offs and unintended consequences are explicit.

    The goal is not merely correct answers. It is sound judgement.

    3. Preparing for economic transition

    Amodei anticipates significant labour market disruption. Whether timelines prove accurate or not, the direction is clear: automation will continue to reshape professional life.

    Education must therefore strengthen lifelong learning pathways, cultivate capabilities that are difficult to automate — creativity, communication, ethical reasoning, and leadership — and align curricula with evolving realities rather than static job descriptions.

    4. Ethics and governance as core content

    When technological capability outpaces governance, responsibility cannot remain peripheral.

    Education must integrate technology with law, public policy and the humanities. Students should see themselves not only as users or engineers, but as stewards of complex systems whose consequences extend beyond efficiency.

    5. Institutions must mature

    If technology is in its adolescence, educational institutions must mature alongside it. That requires continuous professional development in AI literacy, greater curricular flexibility, and stronger interdisciplinary cultures. Institutional rigidity is becoming a strategic liability.

    Conclusion

    Amodei’s metaphor serves as both a warning and an opportunity.

    If technology advances faster than our ability to govern it, education becomes the primary arena in which societies cultivate judgement, responsibility and wisdom.

    The task is not simply to teach new tools. It is to form citizens capable of understanding, questioning and guiding technologies whose power increasingly rivals that of our institutions.

  • Are University Degrees Still Worth It?

    The question resurfaced this week after a report in Le Monde highlighted a growing scepticism towards university degrees among some Silicon Valley founders and investors. Critics argue that higher education has become too expensive, ideologically rigid, and increasingly disconnected from labour-market realities—particularly at a moment when generative AI appears to be reshaping entry-level technical roles and the cultural myth of the self-taught dropout-founder retains symbolic power.

    Whether such claims are overstated or selectively framed, the underlying uncertainty deserves attention. We genuinely do not yet know how employers will value traditional academic credentials in a labour market where demonstrable skills, adaptability and experience may carry greater weight than formal qualifications alone.

    Yet reducing higher education to a signalling mechanism or a short-term employability metric would be a serious mistake.

    A university degree is not solely about what students know at graduation. It concerns what they become through the disciplined process of study. When intellectual standards are demanding, and learning environments remain open and rigorous, universities cultivate capacities that are difficult to automate: critical reasoning, sustained argumentation, epistemic humility, curiosity, collaboration, resilience and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

    These are not ornamental virtues. They are structural competencies for uncertain, AI-centred economies.

    There is also a deeper human dimension. The university remains one of the few institutions explicitly designed not merely to transmit knowledge or train workers, but to help individuals interpret the world, challenge inherited assumptions, refine their judgement and articulate a sense of purpose. That form of formation does not always map neatly onto quarterly hiring data, yet societies have historically relied on it.

    We do not know whether companies will reward degrees as they once did. But if students approach their studies seriously, and if professors defend the academic mission with clarity and courage, higher education can still offer something that is increasingly scarce: not merely credentials, but the cultivated capacity to think, to reason and to act with discernment.

  • What Do Students Choose After Secondary School? A Comparison Between Spain and France

    As schools and universities prepare for admissions in the 2026–2027 academic year, one question remains open: what will students choose?

    Although we cannot yet determine how preferences will shift in the coming cycle, recent data from Spain and France offer useful signals. Patterns from the previous admissions round reveal not only disciplinary preferences but also how institutional structures shape educational demand.

    Across both countries, students tend to favour fields perceived as professionally reliable. Health-related programmes dominate — through PASS in France and through highly competitive entry thresholds in Spain — while Law, Psychology, Business/Economics and STEM disciplines continue to attract sustained demand.

    Yet the architecture of each national system significantly shapes how these preferences manifest.

    France’s centralised platform, Parcoursup, makes student choices nationally visible and creates strong concentration effects. PASS applications, for instance, dwarf most other pathways, reinforcing national hierarchies of prestige and selectivity.

    Spain’s decentralised admissions model, by contrast, spreads demand across autonomous regions and institutions. Programme-level competition is increasingly evident, with double degrees and engineering pathways often demanding particularly high entry thresholds. Rather than a single national hierarchy, differentiation is driven by institutional reputation and programme design.

    Three observations follow.

    1. Employment rationality.

    Students gravitate towards fields with clear labour market signals — health, law, engineering, and business. Even before entering university, young people are acutely aware of economic uncertainty and future employability.

    2. STEM prestige on the rise.

    Mathematics, engineering and data-related pathways increasingly attract high-performing students. Technological transformation appears not to deter applicants but to reinforce the perceived value of quantitative and technical disciplines.

    3. Systems shape demand.

    Centralisation reinforces national hierarchies (France), whereas decentralisation fosters institutional competition and programme differentiation (Spain). The same generational concerns are filtered through distinct structural incentives.

    Taken together, these patterns offer insight into how young Europeans imagine their economic futures in a context shaped by artificial intelligence, demographic pressures and evolving labour markets. Preferences are not merely academic; they reflect broader perceptions of security, prestige and opportunity.

  • What Generative AI Is Changing in Upper Secondary and Sixth Form

    Generative AI is not diminishing the value of education. It is shifting the locus of value.

    For over a century, secondary schooling rewarded technical execution: writing structured essays, summarising texts, performing calculations, translating languages and applying standard procedures. Generative systems now perform many of these tasks with speed and fluency. The educational premium, therefore, moves elsewhere — towards capacities that are far more difficult to automate.

    The centre of gravity is shifting from execution to judgement.

    Early international signals point in three consistent directions.

    1. From “doing” to “deciding”

    Students must not only solve problems but also formulate tasks, evaluate outputs, define criteria and justify choices. The Brookings Institution has described this emerging demand as the cultivation of “judgment in ambiguity” (2024).

    In an AI-augmented environment, knowing how to proceed is no longer enough. Students must know when, why and under what assumptions they proceed.

    2. From product to process

    Assessment is gradually moving towards traceability: hypotheses formulated, alternatives considered, revisions made, and reasons articulated. The OECD (2023) identifies this shift as essential for what it terms “future-proof cognitive resilience.”

    The emphasis is less on the polished final product and more on the intellectual pathway that produced it.

    3. Disciplinary thinking + AI (not either/or)

    AI does not replace Mathematics, Biology or History. It raises the conceptual bar within them. The International Baccalaureate has already incorporated AI literacy into academic honesty and assessment guidance (IBO 2023–2025 updates), signalling that disciplinary integrity must coexist with technological fluency.

    The implication is structural.

    If this trajectory continues, upper secondary education may begin to resemble university sooner than expected: less reproduction, more argumentation; less execution, more criteria; fewer tasks to complete, more decisions to defend.

    The schools that will thrive are not those that merely teach students to “use AI,” but those that develop students capable of thinking with AI without outsourcing their own thinking.

  • Jacques Ellul and Education Today: Three Short Lessons

    Long before digital platforms and generative AI entered the educational debate, Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) articulated a critique of technology that remains strikingly prescient.

    Ellul did not oppose technology in itself. He questioned its tendency to become autonomous — to reorganise social life around its own internal logic of efficiency. That insight offers several lessons for contemporary education.

    1. Technology tends to become an end, not a means

    In The Technological Society (1954), Ellul argued that modern technique evolves into a self-expanding system driven by efficiency and optimisation. Once established, it begins to dictate its own imperatives.

    The educational parallel is uncomfortable. When schools adopt tools because they are available, scalable or fashionable — before asking what form of human development they serve — pedagogy risks being shaped by technology rather than guiding it.

    2. Efficiency is a technical value, not an educational one

    In The Technological System (1977), Ellul warned that efficiency optimises processes but remains indifferent to meaning, wisdom or moral judgment.

    Education, however, is not primarily about optimisation. Learning environments that prioritise speed, metrics and procedural performance may inadvertently sideline deeper understanding, sustained reflection and intellectual maturity. Efficiency is not neutral; it privileges certain forms of value over others.

    3. The greatest danger is the delegation of judgment

    In Propaganda (1962), Ellul showed how modern systems can subtly displace individual judgment through automation and mass communication.

    Today, AI-driven feedback and assessment systems can undoubtedly support learning. Yet if judgment is routinely outsourced — if criteria, evaluation and discernment are delegated to automated systems — education risks producing competent users rather than free and responsible thinkers.

    Ellul’s work does not provide ready-made solutions for digital schooling. What it offers is a discipline of vigilance.

    Education must consciously govern technology so that it remains a tool in the service of truth, understanding and human freedom — rather than allowing technique to become the unexamined horizon within which formation takes place.