Beyond Intelligence: What Should We Teach When Thinking Is No Longer Scarce?
In the third issue of Garimau, the communication scholar Salvador Doblas Arrebola reflects on young people, education and artificial intelligence. His answers are worth reading slowly, and worth arguing with.
Written by: Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea
Before writing about education and artificial intelligence, it is worth asking who will read this. You are probably reading on a screen, between two other things. You may already have asked an AI a question this week. And there is a fair chance you are giving these lines less attention than you would like, because everything around them is competing for it too.
That is not a complaint. It is simply where we are, and it should change how an article like this is written. If the reader lives in noise, the text cannot add to it. It should slow down, ask more than it answers, and leave some room to think. McLuhan told us the medium is the message. An article about critical thinking that only delivered conclusions would contradict itself before the second paragraph.
So this is less a summary than a conversation with a friend’s ideas.
A line of free verse
Salvador Doblas Arrebola holds a doctorate in Communication and a Master’s in Strategic Management and Innovation in Communication. He teaches Advertising Creativity at the Faculty of Communication and Marketing, and on the Master’s in Cognitive Sciences, both at the University of Málaga. He is also someone who walks, dances, meditates and gives time to philanthropic projects, and who says, without irony, that teaching, research and communication are not three jobs but one vocation.
Salvador Doblas Arrebola with his students.
He is, in the Spanish expression, a verso suelto: a line of free verse that refuses to rhyme with the rest. That is exactly why he fits so naturally in Garimau, a magazine that lives somewhere between art and thought. His interview in issue no. 3 is gentle in tone and demanding in substance. What follows is my reading of it, and my own translations of his words.
Doubt as a method
As freethinkers and, I hope, as humanists, we look at the world in order to keep doubting. Doubt is not a weakness. It is the force that sends us looking for new answers when the old ones stop working. It is also the right way to read Salvador: not to agree with him, but to think alongside him.
His starting point is Paulo Freire’s idea that nobody educates anybody else; people educate one another, through the world they share. From there he draws a clear picture of what young people need. Information is not enough; it is everywhere. They need orientation, meaning and ethical references, and help to think, discern and build a conscious relationship with themselves and with the world. Every student, he says, brings a story, a question and a particular way of looking.
This is where critical thinking stops being a subject and becomes a condition. Without it, everything else a young person learns is exposed to manipulation, to the bubble, to the slow flattening of thought that Salvador warns about later in the interview.
And there is an uncomfortable consequence. If we want young people to think critically, we need teachers who do, and who know how to pass it on. These are competences, not personal virtues, and they can be trained. Yet teacher training rarely addresses them. So the question is not only what we teach young people. It is who teaches the teachers to doubt.
Here a little Socratic irony is useful. Can we really change people, and the world? Every educator hopes so. But transformation has an uncomfortable twin, and its name is indoctrination. History is full of people who knew exactly how humanity should be improved, and who were capable of the worst precisely because they were so sure. Socrates’ way out was to know that he did not know. Perhaps the only legitimate way to change someone is to help them resist being changed, including by us.
Salvador’s own formula for the teacher is elegant: demanding but close, clear but flexible, able to build trust without losing depth. Each pair holds two forces in balance, and I would sign it. But I wonder whether balance is enough. Today’s teacher may need to be more polyfaceted:
- able to say “I don’t know” in public
- able to be wrong in front of a class, and to show how one corrects oneself
- able to cause useful discomfort, not only to build trust
- present with the body as well as the word
- able to listen, which is more than being close
Salvador himself says that the teacher learns in every classroom. That idea deserves to be the formula’s first line, not its footnote.
Connection is not conversation
Salvador is precise about technology. The medium, he reminds us, is never a neutral channel: it shapes how we look and what we pay attention to. With Sherry Turkle, he warns that constant but fragmented connection can quietly replace conversation, and with it the human density of real encounter, which needs time, attention and a certain vulnerability. His conclusion is not to reject technology. It is to stop it from replacing the most valuable part of what happens between people.
Beyond intelligence
On artificial intelligence, Salvador’s stance is prudence and interest at once. It is a powerful tool for analysis, production and organisation, but it cannot replace human perspective or critical judgement. The question, he says, is not what technology can do, but what we decide to do with it. Used with judgement, it expands what we can do. Adopted without reflection, it impoverishes language, homogenises thought and weakens us as subjects.
In Odiseo we asked, in the spring of 2023, what AI would cost us. This autumn we explained why the Escola now teaches it rather than ignoring it. I want to push the question one step further, because most of today’s debate quietly assumes that AI will stay roughly as it is: a tool, in our hands.
What if it doesn’t? What if its cognitive capacity keeps growing, and matches or overtakes ours in more and more fields? Then the question changes.
It is no longer how to use the tool well, but what education is for, once intelligence is no longer scarce.
That is the question behind Education Beyond Intelligence, the programme we will run on board this October. Its modules are about what lies beyond intelligence:
- theatre, to work on body, presence and action
- music, to work on listening, attention and inner discipline
- ethics and emotions, to work on responsibility and the common good
- learning how to learn, and understanding how teams actually work
None of this competes with a machine. All of it becomes more important as machines improve. Salvador asks what place we want to keep for consciousness, creativity and human responsibility. I cannot think of a better syllabus.
Did you know?
Odiseo first asked what artificial intelligence would cost us in its Spring 2023 issue. Three years later, the question has changed: not what AI costs, but what education is for.
On what ground do we build?
Salvador believes the future will be different and more mediated by technology, but not automatically better or worse. The challenge, he says, is human rather than technical: what kind of coexistence do we want?
It is worth noticing what he does not mention. There is no religion in his answers. His foundations are education, judgement, responsibility, and a sensitivity that is almost spiritual. For centuries, religions provided much of the shared ground on which values were built. If that ground is no longer common, what replaces it? Can humanism alone carry the weight? I do not know. I suspect the question matters more than any quick answer.
What I do see is that the ground is shifting. More and more is built on fictitious realities. Truth risks becoming whatever the majority happens to believe. Reactionary movements grow by offering simple certainties in an uncertain world. The information bubbles Salvador cites from Eli Pariser are not a technical detail; they are the machinery of this process, because they only let us meet people who already agree with us.
On board, we will try something modest in response. Each participant will write before reading anyone else, so that every voice exists before the group can absorb it. People will be paired for contrast, not affinity. Disagreement will be recorded and kept, not dissolved into consensus. And signing the final declaration will be voluntary, with declining counted as a legitimate choice. None of this hands anyone the truth. It builds the conditions for people to think for themselves in front of others. That may be the only foundation that does not harden into dogma.
Building paths
At the Escola we try to build paths with teachers and with students, rather than handing them a route already drawn. Our scale is limited, and so is our capacity. But every achievement counts, and there is one way to multiply it: through teachers. Each teacher who learns to doubt, to listen and to accompany will reach students we will never meet. That is why training trainers matters so much to us, and why our CHIRON network of specialised teachers exists.
From where I stand, training professionals in logistics, transport and trade, AI is already changing jobs and skills. The answer cannot only be technical. It has to be humanist: educating people who can judge, decide and take responsibility, precisely because machines will increasingly do the rest. Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar, wrote Machado. There is no path; the path is made by walking.
A serene resistance
Salvador closes his interview with an idea I would like to keep. In times of haste, noise and excess stimulus, defending sensitivity, beauty and critical thinking is a form of serene resistance. He borrows a question from Manly P. Hall: what could be nobler than to bring light to ignorance? And he adds that knowledge only reaches its true height when it becomes wisdom, understanding and a more lucid life.
Next month we set sail for Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa. Cavafy would remind us that the voyage matters more than the arrival. The same is true of this question. We will not settle what education is for once intelligence is no longer scarce. But we can keep asking it well, in good company, one classroom at a time.
