A summary of an article published in 2025.
Schools do not only decide what students should learn.
They also decide when, where, how long, with whom, and often how students should learn.
A prescribed curriculum fills the timetable. Pedagogy organizes how that curriculum is delivered. Activities determine what students do. Learning environments define where learning happens. Assessment determines what counts as success.
Together, these elements do something powerful but often overlooked:
They control students’ time and space.
In the age of AI, this control deserves much greater scrutiny.
How Much Time Do Students Actually Control?
A useful way to think about student autonomy is to ask a simple question:
How much time do students actually control for themselves?
We call this Time Available for Autonomy, or TAFA.
Every student has only 24 hours in a day. After sleep, meals, school, homework, tutoring, test preparation, and other required activities are subtracted, what remains is the time students can decide how to use.
In many education systems, that amount is surprisingly small.
The problem is not simply that students spend many hours in school. The prescribed curriculum extends its reach beyond school through homework, tutoring, exam preparation, and extracurricular activities designed to improve school performance. As a result, the school curriculum may occupy much more of a young person’s life than the official school day suggests.
If we want students to become autonomous learners, perhaps the first thing we should give them is not another course.
Perhaps we should give them time.
More Curriculum May Mean Less Learning
When education systems encounter a new problem, their typical response is to add something.
Concerned about social-emotional development? Add SEL.
Concerned about financial literacy? Add a course.
Concerned about AI? Add AI literacy.
Each addition may be worthwhile. But every new requirement occupies more student time and leaves less room for students to discover what they care about.
The answer may therefore be not to add more curriculum, but to require less.
One possibility is a three-part curriculum: some learning required nationally, some determined locally by schools or communities, and a substantial portion controlled by individual students.
Students would have real time to pursue interests, develop strengths, investigate problems, and decide what, how, when, and with whom they want to learn.
Time Is Experienced, Not Just Measured
There is also another dimension of time.
An hour is always 60 minutes, but it does not always feel like 60 minutes.
A boring class can feel endless. A meaningful project can make hours disappear.
That difference matters.
Many school activities are externally prescribed and tightly scheduled. Students move through lessons, assignments, deadlines, and tests according to someone else’s timetable. The result may be compliance without engagement.
Learning activities should instead be designed around meaning, purpose, curiosity, and ownership.
When students are deeply engaged in something they care about, time becomes a resource rather than a constraint.
The question schools should ask is not merely:
“Did students spend enough time on the task?”
It should also be:
“Was this time meaningful to them?”
When Time Is Compressed, Space Shrinks Too
Time and space are deeply connected.
When students spend nearly all their time completing prescribed schoolwork, their learning world becomes smaller.
They have less opportunity to explore communities, connect with experts, work with people outside school, pursue unfamiliar interests, or encounter unexpected ideas.
AI changes this dramatically.
Knowledge is no longer confined to textbooks, classrooms, or teachers. Students can learn from people, resources, communities, and intelligent systems anywhere in the world.
The learning environment can therefore become global and local at the same time.
Students might use global resources and AI while working on problems in their own communities. They could learn from anyone, with anyone, and for anyone, while remaining deeply connected to local needs and relationships.
The classroom no longer needs to be the boundary of learning.
Teachers and Assessment Must Change Too
If students gain more control over time and space, the teacher’s role changes.
Teachers become less like curriculum delivery systems and more like mentors, coaches, facilitators, tutors, and advisers who step in when learners need help.
Assessment must also change.
Standardized tests observe students through a very narrow window: a particular subject, at a particular moment, using a particular measure.
But human development unfolds over years and across many settings.
Assessment should therefore move away from ranking students on a single scale and toward understanding their growth, potential, strengths, interests, and individual development.
Instead of flattening students into averages, assessment should reveal what makes each learner distinctive.
AI Gives Us a Chance to Return Learning to Learners
AI makes many traditional forms of instruction easier to provide.
That should not encourage us to fill students’ lives with even more required learning.
It should create the opposite possibility.
If knowledge, explanations, tutoring, and expertise are increasingly available on demand, schools can loosen their control over when and where learning happens.
The central question may therefore no longer be:
“How can schools use students’ time more efficiently?”
It may be:
“How much of students’ time and learning space are we willing to return to them?”
A genuine educational paradigm shift in the age of AI may begin with something surprisingly simple:
Give students more time, more space, and more freedom to become the authors of their own learning.
Based on the original article:
Zhong, R., & Zhao, Y. (2025). Education paradigm shifts in the age of AI: A spatiotemporal analysis of learning. ECNU Review of Education, 8(2), 319–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311251315204
The article was first published online on February 11, 2025.
