From Enchantment to Responsibility: Cultivating Ethical Action through Critical AI Literacy in Education

This chapter addresses the ethical and epistemological challenges posed by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into educational environments. While AI tools are increasingly promoted as solutions for personalization, efficiency, and learning optimization, their use often leads to a reduction of pedagogical complexity and a shift toward epistemic passivity. Students are encouraged to accept machine outputs without question, while teachers are repositioned as facilitators of opaque systems whose inner workings they do not understand. Drawing on a critical theoretical framework and building on the distinction between ethical form and ethical action (Essenfelder et al., 2023), the chapter proposes an approach to Critical AI Literacy that moves beyond technical skills to include reflexive, ethical, and interpretive competencies. It presents four pedagogical strategies designed to foster this literacy: , , , and . These interventions are meant to help students interrogate algorithmic outputs, understand systemic biases, and reclaim authorship in AI-mediated contexts. The chapter argues that AI should not be rejected outright, nor adopted uncritically, but engaged with as a socio-technical system that shapes what counts as knowledge, learning, and agency. Ultimately, the goal is to cultivate students’ capacity for ethical action in technologically mediated environments and to reassert education as a space of dissent, deliberation, and epistemic responsibility. Critical AI Literacy, we suggest, is not an optional enrichment but a necessary condition for preserving the democratic and humanistic ethos of education in the age of intelligent systems.