Are schools preparing students to decide, or just to comply? Agency skills give students the ability to make choices, take responsibility and act on their own judgement. A student’s everyday experience can tell us more than a policy statement ever will. Here is one example.
A twelfth grader once walked into her class teacher’s office with an unusual request: she wanted to swap her assigned science project topic for one she’d been reading about on her own. This was something outside the syllabus, with no template to follow and no guarantee it would work.
The teacher’s instinct was to say no. The assigned topic had a rubric, a known outcome and a predictable grade. She said yes anyway on one condition: the student would have to define her own success criteria and defend them.
What the teacher handed over in that moment wasn’t just a choice of topic, it was agency: the chance to set a direction, own the reasoning behind it, and be responsible for how it turned out.
The project didn’t go perfectly. Parts of it failed. But months later, that student would say it was the first time school had asked her to ‘decide’ and not just complete something.
This simple example points to a much bigger question for schools: are students actually given agency over their own learning, or are they given the illusion of choice within carefully defined boundaries?
We often teach students about freedom as an important part of our history. But there is another question schools need to consider: are we preparing young people to handle freedom, or simply teaching them about it?
Independence isn’t granted the day a student graduates. It’s built, one small decision at a time, over years of being allowed to choose, fail, adjust, and choose again. If a system never gives students that practice, freedom on paper doesn’t turn into independence in life.
That brings us to a question worth asking in our classrooms and campuses: is freedom something students experience, or simply something they are told about?
Why this matters more now than before
Two things have changed the stakes and both are reshaping what it means for students to be truly independent learners.
First, the job market students are walking into rewards judgement over compliance. Employers aren’t just hiring people who can follow instructions well. They also want people who can understand a situation, make decisions and determine what needs to be done.
Second, AI has effectively removed the excuse “I didn’t have the resources to explore.” A student today can research almost any topic, draft any essay, solve an equation or get feedback on any idea, instantly.
The scarcity that once justified rigid, one-size-fits-all instruction is gone. What matters now isn’t just access to information, but the judgement to use it well and the self-knowledge to know what is worth pursuing.
This makes student agency more important by asking: How can school leaders address these emerging demands?
Curriculum, evaluation systems, and campus culture all send signals about how much real agency students are allowed and those signals are set at the top. School leaders have a role in shaping those signals and creating opportunities for students to make meaningful decisions.
Four freedoms worth auditing on your campus
1. Freedom of choice
In your institution, where do students get to choose a project topic, an elective path or a way of solving a problem, rather than simply executing a predetermined template?
One practical step is to pick one course or program and build in a genuine choice point. Give students a real decision to make, with real consequences, rather than asking them to choose between a few options that all lead to the same answer.
2. Freedom to experiment and fail safely
Experimentation requires that failure not be catastrophic. If every assessment is high stakes and final, students learn to avoid risk rather than manage it.
A low-stakes draft, prototype or pitch can give students an opportunity to try something, see what works, understand what does not and improve it. The focus can be on the quality of thinking and iteration rather than getting everything right the first time.
3. Freedom to think critically, including AI
Banning AI tools doesn’t build judgement. It can simply delay the moment students have to develop it, often until they are unsupervised and the consequences matter more. The better question is not whether students use AI, but whether they can explain why an AI response is right, wrong or incomplete.
In at least one subject, schools could make students explain their reasoning about an AI output as part of the assessment, rather than assessing only the final AI assisted output.
4. Freedom paired with responsibility
Real independence always comes with responsibility: deadlines, consequences and accountability to others. Freedom without responsibility isn’t independence. It is simply permissiveness.
Whenever students are given a new choice, they can also be given an opportunity to take ownership of that choice. This could happen through self-assessment, peer review or a short reflection on the decision they made and why they made it.
The AI-era twist: Freedom now comes with a machine in the room
In the AI era, freedom for students does not mean fewer rules. It means developing a different and more demanding set of skills. A student today can generate an essay, solve a problem set or produce a finalised project soon. And the old measure of independence, whether a student can work entirely on their own, is becoming less relevant.
But now, an important question is emerging: can the student tell whether the work is good? Can they recognize whether it is accurate and relevant? And do they know what they actually wanted to say before asking the machine to say it for them?
A student who can prompt an AI tool well but can’t evaluate what comes back has more access, not more independence. That gap between access and judgement is exactly what schools now have to address deliberately. AI won’t close it on its own. In fact, a tool that always produces confident-sounding answers makes the gap easier to miss.
The agency skills that matter most now
If AI can generate answers, drafts and options faster than any student, the skills worth building deliberately are the ones AI cannot do for them: the skills that help students question, evaluate, direct and use that output wisely. These are the human skills that determine whether greater access to AI actually leads to greater independence.
Five skills are particularly important in this context:
1. Critical evaluation:
Students need to be able to read an AI-generated answer, or any answer and ask: is this response, right and how would I know? Fluency should not become a substitute for accuracy.
Giving students opportunities to fact-check and question AI-generated content can help make critical evaluation part of everyday learning.
2. Self-knowledge:
Students need to know their own interests, values and goals well enough to direct a powerful tool instead of simply following whatever it suggests first.
Reflection, mentoring conversations, journaling and open-ended learning experiences can give students the space to understand what they want to pursue and why.
3. Ethical judgement:
Students need to recognise when using AI is appropriate, when it crosses into misrepresenting their own work or thinking, and when a shortcut comes with a real cost.
This requires more than rules about what is banned. Students also need opportunities to discuss real situations and the grey areas that come with AI use.
4. Communication and collaboration:
Being able to communicate an idea clearly, negotiate, persuade, disagree and work with others remains fundamentally important.
As AI handles more individual written output, schools may need to place greater value on group work, presentations and discussion-based activities where students have to communicate and collaborate with other people.
5. Resilience and adaptability:
Students need the willingness to try something that may not work, learn from the setback and adjust their approach. The twelfth grader in the opening example was developing exactly this ability through her science project. The project did not go perfectly, but she had the opportunity to make decisions, deal with setbacks and continue.
Schools can make this kind of learning more visible by treating drafts, false starts and revisions as part of the learning process rather than something to hide before submission.
None of these skills are new. What’s new is how urgent they’ve become, now that the “hard part” of producing an answer has gotten so much easier. Educational leadership has a role in building these skills deliberately, just as schools have deliberately built literacy and numeracy. These skills will not develop by accident, and restricting AI access alone will not build them.
Also read: Are We Ready for the Freedom AI Gives Us at Work?
The one idea to carry into the new term
Freedom is not simply having choices. Freedom is having the skills and judgement to make those choices responsibly.
For educational leaders, that reframes the question. It isn’t simply about how much freedom students should be given. It’s about what schools are doing systematically to build the judgement and the human skills behind it that make their freedom worth having.
Especially now, when AI can give students more choices and capabilities than before, schools need to help them learn how to use that freedom well. That may be one of the most important lessons about freedom that we can give to our students.
