The Class of 2026 booed the AI. They were right to. Here’s what school leaders need to hear.
I wrote this in the United States. Florida sunshine, theme parks, the kind of relentless, overwhelming spectacle that makes you feel very far from a primary school on a small island in the Irish Sea.
And yet.
The education conversation found me here, as it always does. Because this month, across America, something quietly extraordinary has been happening at graduation ceremonies. Something that, once you hear it, is impossible to ignore — not because it is shocking, but because it is clarifying.
Schools across the country have been using AI to read out graduates’ names as they collect their diplomas. The logic, on paper, is entirely reasonable. Avoid mispronunciation. Ensure consistency. Remove the pressure from the staff member on the microphone who has been quietly dreading the moment they reach Xiomara Guadalupe-Hernandez. It is the kind of sensible, efficiency-driven decision that looks fine in a planning meeting.
But the students and parents didn’t think it was fine. They pushed back — hard, and in numbers.
At Glendale Community College in Arizona, the AI system skipped hundreds of names entirely. Students walked the stage in silence. In silence. At Columbia University, students and faculty protested the very idea before it could be implemented. At Davis High School in Utah, a petition gathered nearly 1,000 signatures before the ceremony had even taken place. And at graduation events across the country, when speakers praised AI from the podium, the Class of 2026 responded with jeers.
They were not being technophobic. They were not being difficult. They were not failing to understand the technology.
They were telling us something important. And as school leaders, we would be wise to listen.
What a name means
That moment — your name, called out loud, as you walk across a stage — is not a data transfer. It is not a pronunciation problem to be solved by a more sophisticated language model. It is not an administrative task.
It is a human being being witnessed.
It is the culmination of years of effort, difficulty, growth and becoming. It is the moment when an institution — a school, a college, a university — looks at a young person and says: we see you. We know who you are. We are marking this. The name read aloud is not information. It is recognition. And recognition, in its fullest sense, requires a human being to give it.
The instinct that said “this doesn’t feel right” was not sentiment getting in the way of progress. It was wisdom. And that instinct points directly to the thing I have been thinking about for some time — what I have come to call the human edge.
What the human edge actually is
The human edge is not a vague appeal to the warmth of teachers against the coldness of machines. It is something more specific, more earned, and more important than that.
It is the teacher who notices that a child is quieter than usual on a Tuesday morning and knows — without data, without a dashboard, without an algorithm flagging a behavioural anomaly — that something is wrong. It is the relationship built over months and years that makes a child feel safe enough to try something difficult, to fail at it, and to try again. It is the adult in the room who carries the values, models the character, holds the culture, and makes a classroom feel like a place where it is safe to be human.
It is identity. Knowing who you are, why you’re there, and what you stand for — and bringing that into the room every single day, even when you’re tired, even when the system is demanding more than it has any right to, even when the reward for doing it well is invisible and unmeasured.
No model can replicate this. No algorithm can manufacture it. The most sophisticated AI systems in existence read human emotional states with around 68% accuracy. Experienced human teachers do it at 92%. That gap is not a technical problem waiting to be solved. It is the human edge — and it is the thing that makes teaching, at its best, one of the most consequential acts one person can perform for another.
What AI should actually be doing
But here is where I want to be direct, because this argument can too easily be read as a defence of the status quo. It is not.
I believe passionately in the human edge. I also believe, with equal conviction, that far too many teachers are spending far too many hours on work that does not require it.
Lesson planning. Pupil progress analysis. Report drafting. Resource creation. Marking. Administrative load. Meeting preparation. Communication. Data entry. These tasks consume teacher time in enormous quantities — and most of them do not require the relationship, the presence, the identity, the irreplaceable human qualities that only a teacher can bring. They require cognitive effort, time and accuracy. And AI can provide all three, at scale, with increasing sophistication.
Teachers who use AI tools effectively save an average of nearly six hours a week. Six hours. That is six hours that can be reinvested in the work only they can do — the noticing, the relationship-building, the mentoring, the presence, the culture-holding that no system can do for them.
This is the deal I want to make, as a system leader: AI takes the weight that doesn’t require your humanity, so that your humanity is available for the work that does.
The same principle applies to school leadership. Data synthesis. Strategic analysis. Communication drafts. Policy research. Pattern recognition across complex systems. Stakeholder mapping. These are not the things that make a great school leader. They are the things that consume a great school leader’s time and leave less of it for the work that actually matters — being present, building relationships, holding the values of the institution against the relentless pressure of everything that would erode them.
AI, used with intent and mastery, gives that time back.
The question that requires identity
The distinction I keep returning to is this: the best teachers and leaders I know are no longer asking “should we use AI?” They have moved past that. They are asking something harder and more interesting: “what should AI do, so that I can do what only I can do?”
That question sounds simple. It is not. It requires you to be clear — genuinely, rigorously clear — about what it is that you uniquely bring. What is the thing that happens when you are in the room that would not happen if you were not? What is the relationship, the instinct, the presence, the values-in-action that cannot be replicated or substituted?
That question requires clarity about who you are.
And this, I think, is where the deeper challenge lies — not in the technology, but in the identity work that has to precede it. Leaders and teachers who are unclear about their own identity, their own purpose, their own irreducible value, will struggle to make good decisions about what to hand to AI and what to hold. Because you cannot decide what to give away if you do not know what you are keeping.
Identity is not a soft concept. In an age of AI, it is a strategic one.
What the Class of 2026 understood
The students who booed — the ones who circulated petitions and walked silently across stages and protested at universities — were not being anti-technology. They were asserting something that the adults planning those ceremonies had, for a moment, forgotten.
That their name matters. That being seen matters. That the human moment of recognition — imperfect, mispronounced perhaps, but human — is not a problem to be optimised. It is the point.
And if we are serious about getting AI right in education, in leadership, in schools — this is where we have to start. Not with the tools. Not with the efficiency gains. Not with the curriculum frameworks or the policy documents or the procurement decisions.
With the human edge. With clarity about what only we can do, and why it matters.
AI belongs in our schools and in our leadership. It belongs in lesson planning and data analysis and report writing and every hour of administrative burden we can responsibly transfer to it. But it does not belong in the moment when a young person walks across a stage and hears their name called out loud for the first time as a graduate.
That moment belongs to us.
The Class of 2026 already knows this.
Perhaps the rest of us need to catch up.
