When Confidence Left the Classroom

Why self belief is slipping faster than anyone wants to admit.

There was a time when students walked into my classroom with a kind of natural steadiness. They weren’t always sure of the answers, but they were sure they could at least try. I really miss that. These days I see more hesitation in the room. More glances toward screens. More quiet deflation when things aren’t instantly clear. I’ve come to believe it’s not laziness. It’s been replaced by something softer, more fragile, almost tender: dependence.

AGI didn’t just give students answers. It gave them relief. For many of them, it is the first voice in their life that never judges, never interrupts, never sighs, never says you should know this by now. It wraps them in certainty. And what they don’t realise is that certainty is a sedative.

Those of us that have lived through it know, confidence is built in the gaps. In the moment you hesitate, try anyway, stumble, recover. In the moment you look at a blank slide or piece of paper and think well, here goes nothing. Today those gaps are filled instantly, effortlessly, invisibly. Students don’t wrestle with uncertainty anymore. They outsource it.

And here is the part that caught me off guard: it hurts. Not because they are using the tools everyone uses now, but because it creates a distance between us. A shield. I can feel them learning next to me rather than with me, because they trust the machine’s warmth before they trust mine.

So I’ve started doing something I never did in my early years: slowing down. Staying closer. Sitting with them longer than the schedule says I should. Not as a professor trying to maintain authority, but as an adult showing them what confidence looks like in practice. Being present. Being predictable. Keeping my word. Giving them small wins they can own; like intermediary grading, letting them integrate my idea in their team project, or simply class wide recognition. Building the muscle memory of “I can do this without the machine”. And there’s a twinkle of hope.

Because here’s the truth no one in business schools wants to say out loud: students are not lazy. They’re just scared. Scared of being wrong. Scared of disappointing (their stakeholders). Scared of grades. Scared of being exposed. AGI didn’t invent that fear. It just made hiding easier.

If business schools want to matter, they need to rebuild confidence as a human craft. Confidence from being seen. Confidence from trying. Confidence from failing with someone waiting on the other side. Tools like AGI can scale knowledge but they cannot scale courage.

And from my locus, courage is what our students need most.