Who Designs the Designer? Behavioural Architecture for GenAI in Education

Abstract

AI in education is stuck between two failed responses: banning AI and building content-only tutors. Both fail because they ignore what decades of research has established: that personality, motivation, and emotional state shape learning outcomes as strongly as cognitive ability. This paper proposes behavioural architecture as an alternative. In the proposed architecture, the system adapts to how a student learns, not only to what they learn next. The student co-authors the record the system keeps, can read it, revise it, and revoke it. The designer role, what the system treats as true about the student, shifts from the AI vendor alone to a distribution among educator, student, and system. The paper argues that this architecture requires governance at EU level: the institution operating the system is the same one assessing the student, and individual institutions cannot provide the structural protections this configuration demands. Five empirical questions are proposed to test whether the architecture delivers on its claims. The contribution is naming a vacancy: the designer role in AI-in-education is currently unoccupied, and occupying it requires infrastructure that does not yet exist.