Abstract:

Education in the AI era faces a profound tension between technological rationality and humanistic emotion. Education is an emotional practice aimed at cultivating culture, and Confucian rational-emotional thought provides a new perspective for reflecting on the impact of technology on education. Educational emotion should be grounded in genuine feeling and skilled practice, following the emotional logic of universal care and the ethical principles of harmony and co-existence. The “unfeeling” path of technology raises concerns about education becoming “emotionless,” manifested in four ways: virtual educational contexts lead to hidden and distorted emotions; blind application of technology generates emotional generalization and inarticulacy; passive entanglement with technology forces emotions into objectification and detachment; and the diffracted logic of technological rationality results in emotional bias and absence. The emotional wisdom of Confucian rational-emotional thought in education lies in transforming the emotional cognition of educational subjects through mutual empathy with the world, cultivating emotional skills for human-machine cooperation via digital nurturing, adhering to the ethics of proper technological use to clarify emotional boundaries in digital interactions, and realizing human-machine co-existence to advance an emotionally intelligent education in which feeling and wisdom develop together.

Key words: artificial intelligence, Confucian rational-emotional thought, educational emotion, emotional turn