Foundational education in the age of AI: What remains after the classical education myth falls?

The contemporary discourse on artificial intelligence in education suffers from a normative vacuum: policies invoke humanistic values without defining them, and frameworks classify technological integration without evaluating its purpose. This article addresses that vacuum by identifying the enduring principles of humanistic formation through rigorous comparative analysis. It first demonstrates that ‘classical education’ – the most prominent contemporary attempt to recover humanistic foundations – is an invented tradition (Hobsbawm) conflating distinct historical systems under a retrospective label. It then examines seven educational traditions – Greek paideia, Roman educatio, medieval scholastica, Renaissance studia humanitatis, Confucian junzi formation, Islamic adab and Indian gurukula – revealing their radical heterogeneity but also their structural convergences. From these, the article extracts three formal principles (orientation toward truth, toward goodness and beauty, and toward intellectual freedom) and three material practices (attentive reading, argumentative writing and oral expression) that constitute Foundational Education: the minimal set of principles capable of grounding any humanistic educational system. It concludes by demonstrating that these principles resist technological substitution because they concern orientation and formation rather than information and task-performance, and it distils a single normative criterion, the Formation Test, by which specific AI deployments can be evaluated as augmentative or substitutive of humanistic formation.