Artificial intelligence and the internal structure of education: re-reading Dewey through <i>Pädagogik</i> and <i>Didaktik</i>

This paper articulates the internal structure of education and, on this basis, examines the significance and limits of contemporary AI for educational practice. Public, policy, and technological discourse commonly frame AI in terms of personalization, access, and efficiency, while a growing Deweyan literature has explored its implications for inquiry, experience, and democratic life. Yet across these discussions, education is largely taken for granted rather than examined as a distinct form of practice in relation to which the significance and limits of AI are to be understood. The paper argues that contemporary AI can only be understood educationally from the standpoint of the internal structure of education. Re-reading Dewey in dialogue with Pädagogik and Didaktik, it develops an account of education through three internally related dimensions: the relation between growth and pedagogical guidance, the distinction and relation between knowledge and subject matter, and teaching as the pedagogical direction of learners’ activity through subject matter. Taken together, these dimensions provide the standpoint from which the significance and limits of AI become intelligible. The central argument is that AI can mediate educational practice but cannot itself realize the educational relations constitutive of education.