Educators need to reassess the objective for students to learn in each class, and then design the participation to accomplish that in an AI world. For example, if the objective is to be able to write a essay, they should have them write by hand in class. This is the way things were done just a few decades ago, we should be flexible in reevaluating the best method in this new world
I agree. Anything assigned as take-home will just be offloaded to AI. Maybe we could take a page from some successful countries' book and do more work in school while leaving afterschool as a more open time for kids to explore their interests and hobbies (assuming they don't fill it with screentime)
I forgot that the Trump sledge hammer also dismantled the department of education. What a train wreck.
I am on a committee regarding AI use and cheating in our school. It looks quite different and has different solutions in different subjects.
Generally, the solution is live assessment, oracy, but it takes time. Pencil to paper works, socratic discussion works. Providing frames and heuristics and applying to real world examples works. The only drawback is coverage. Less coverage of standards because assessment without paper writing takes a long time.
AI isn't helping young people cheat. It's forcing adults to finally ask the real questions: what's actually worth learning, and how do we make that learning mean something.
School was outdated and broken long before AI showed up. So the knee-jerk reaction, that we just need to keep kids from "cheating," misses the entire point.
I've got at least 10,000 words on this. It's complicated. But start here:
Think about the last time you really learned something. What was the motivation? How did you do it? Seriously, pause and sit with it. My guess is it wasn't for a grade.
Yes, 100%. Grades were an imperfect convenience to assess competence and lesson plans were the failure of a teacher to adapt to an individual student. AI solves both problems.
The undetectable/detectable debate of AI is a red herring, the underlying issue is that we, for much longer than AI has been around, have few tools or methods to verify who wrote or did something. You could cognitively surrender work to your friend, mom, sister, or a paid proxy long before you could to a chat or.
While i agree with the some of commentary and understand the data set examples, it is a real stretch to blame AI's evolution for the defeciencies in math, science , reading and critical thinking and problem solving. (National Assessment of Education Progress , ( 2025). The US instructional designs used in public and private education has not helped either. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are just as residentally deficient across generations.
In this age of the new knowledge economy, we should resist the temptation of being too aggresive and provacative about the perils of AI, rather it may be more productive to work collectively to reform teaching preparation, adapt to the current audience of both student and adult learners by using more innovative learning models such as expanding the use of self-directed and experiential learning integration both in the classrooms and outside the classroom. In American education..... from K-12 to all forms of learning design, its time to reform and change the lens we are using which got its start in the one room school house in the 1800's. Let's spend more time on learning about this emerging technology ensuring AI is the tool it can become not the boggey man.
When I was at school, my Dad used to do my art homework for me - not to encourage me to cheat, but to encourage me to maximise my time on the subjects I really cared about.
There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing some tasks or some aspects of a task. But there are limits. Or there ought to be!
The first two graphs depict reading and math scores plummeting since 2020, long before AI. It’s much more plausible that remote learning after the Covid pandemic is the real culprit.
You hit on a critical point about how commercial AI tools encourage cognitive offloading. However, the fact that a generic tool can so easily pass our school exams or write these essays doesn't just expose the flaws of tech—it exposes that our school systems have been rewarding the mere reproduction of knowledge for far too long.
Learning is inherently a messy, slow process that requires deep cognitive friction, which commercial shortcuts easily wipe out. But since AI is already here and blanket bans are rarely effective, the real work lies in how we respond. Beyond changing what we test, our best path forward might be moving away from these generic platforms and focusing on intentional 'Educational AI'—technology specifically designed to prompt deep, critical reasoning and sharpen human agency, rather than replacing it.
I think this is an extensive conversation that needs to take place in educational spaces. One way that I combat the downside of AI is eliminating the "boogey man" cloak it's usually draped in when brought up. I discuss the pros and cons of AI in my classroom, utilize it as a tool with my students, and train them to use it as a learning tool --- never a replacement of research, thinking, etc. This is the short answer, but I hope more people continue the conversation so we can use AI as the tool and not the "thinker".
The tool-removal studies are the part that should worry people most, and they also settle a question sitting underneath this whole debate. A skill that disappears when the tool is taken away was never transferred to the student. It was rented. That is the line between offloading and dependency, and your own evidence runs it: the gains vanish on removal, so this is dependency, not a quiet trade of detail-level skill for higher-level skill.
Which is why the same tool does opposite things depending on timing. Someone who built the foundation and now offloads detail to work at a higher level is multiplying a skill they own. A student who offloads before building it never forms the skill at all. Same behavior, opposite result. The teacher who said "multiplication tables before the calculator" had the whole thing.
The harder question is what mass education was actually built to produce. If the honest answer is a trustworthy signal of capability for employers, more than learning for its own sake, then AI is not only degrading learning. It is degrading the signal. A degree was valuable because it was expensive to fake. Once it is cheap to fake, it stops carrying information, and some of the panic about thinking is really alarm about a signal collapsing. That does not make the alarm wrong. It makes it deeper.
I ran almost this exact structure on professional sport recently, another system whose stated purpose and real function have quietly come apart. Different system, same question. What does it actually run on, and what is it spending to keep going?
This feels like the practical edge of the question: not whether students can produce answers faster, but whether school still gives them enough practice becoming people who can think without the tool.
I’m a retired educator and technologist and appreciate the thoughtfulness of this essay. And I would like to push further into the next steps. We cannot pretend like AI doesn’t exist. Schools can tailor or prohibit AI on publicly owned devices but let’s be clear, those students have devices at home that are unrestricted that they will use in lieu of their school-issued device and there will be no restraining their use.
So let’s convene a cohort of intellectual leaders and creative problem solvers to develop the tools and skills in teachers so that we CAN let them lead AI lessons in the classroom that will ensure our developing young minds actually learn to control the tool rather than let the tool control them. That’s the goal. As one of your quotes said, learning how to use AI could allow student to go deeper more rapidly…but the alternative is also that we’re talking about kids in K12 whose prefrontal cortices are undeveloped and whose impulse control is virtually nil… it won’t be easy, but learning how and when to control the use of AI in education is of the most critical importance and I look forward to being part of the solution. I’m Chris Lewis and I’m running for School Board in. A Beach and I hope that I can be a thought provoker who brings out the questions that we need answered and that follows with action by our professional curriculum developers who can build the next generation of curriculum and empower teachers to be keepers of the flame of technology so that we don’t bury our heads in the sand but hold them high as we nurture our next generation of digital citizens.
Educators need to reassess the objective for students to learn in each class, and then design the participation to accomplish that in an AI world. For example, if the objective is to be able to write a essay, they should have them write by hand in class. This is the way things were done just a few decades ago, we should be flexible in reevaluating the best method in this new world
I agree. Anything assigned as take-home will just be offloaded to AI. Maybe we could take a page from some successful countries' book and do more work in school while leaving afterschool as a more open time for kids to explore their interests and hobbies (assuming they don't fill it with screentime)
I forgot that the Trump sledge hammer also dismantled the department of education. What a train wreck.
I am on a committee regarding AI use and cheating in our school. It looks quite different and has different solutions in different subjects.
Generally, the solution is live assessment, oracy, but it takes time. Pencil to paper works, socratic discussion works. Providing frames and heuristics and applying to real world examples works. The only drawback is coverage. Less coverage of standards because assessment without paper writing takes a long time.
AI isn't helping young people cheat. It's forcing adults to finally ask the real questions: what's actually worth learning, and how do we make that learning mean something.
School was outdated and broken long before AI showed up. So the knee-jerk reaction, that we just need to keep kids from "cheating," misses the entire point.
I've got at least 10,000 words on this. It's complicated. But start here:
Think about the last time you really learned something. What was the motivation? How did you do it? Seriously, pause and sit with it. My guess is it wasn't for a grade.
Yes, 100%. Grades were an imperfect convenience to assess competence and lesson plans were the failure of a teacher to adapt to an individual student. AI solves both problems.
The undetectable/detectable debate of AI is a red herring, the underlying issue is that we, for much longer than AI has been around, have few tools or methods to verify who wrote or did something. You could cognitively surrender work to your friend, mom, sister, or a paid proxy long before you could to a chat or.
Big tech and the 0.00I% class forced ai on society for a specific reason.
While i agree with the some of commentary and understand the data set examples, it is a real stretch to blame AI's evolution for the defeciencies in math, science , reading and critical thinking and problem solving. (National Assessment of Education Progress , ( 2025). The US instructional designs used in public and private education has not helped either. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are just as residentally deficient across generations.
In this age of the new knowledge economy, we should resist the temptation of being too aggresive and provacative about the perils of AI, rather it may be more productive to work collectively to reform teaching preparation, adapt to the current audience of both student and adult learners by using more innovative learning models such as expanding the use of self-directed and experiential learning integration both in the classrooms and outside the classroom. In American education..... from K-12 to all forms of learning design, its time to reform and change the lens we are using which got its start in the one room school house in the 1800's. Let's spend more time on learning about this emerging technology ensuring AI is the tool it can become not the boggey man.
When I was at school, my Dad used to do my art homework for me - not to encourage me to cheat, but to encourage me to maximise my time on the subjects I really cared about.
There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing some tasks or some aspects of a task. But there are limits. Or there ought to be!
The first two graphs depict reading and math scores plummeting since 2020, long before AI. It’s much more plausible that remote learning after the Covid pandemic is the real culprit.
You hit on a critical point about how commercial AI tools encourage cognitive offloading. However, the fact that a generic tool can so easily pass our school exams or write these essays doesn't just expose the flaws of tech—it exposes that our school systems have been rewarding the mere reproduction of knowledge for far too long.
Learning is inherently a messy, slow process that requires deep cognitive friction, which commercial shortcuts easily wipe out. But since AI is already here and blanket bans are rarely effective, the real work lies in how we respond. Beyond changing what we test, our best path forward might be moving away from these generic platforms and focusing on intentional 'Educational AI'—technology specifically designed to prompt deep, critical reasoning and sharpen human agency, rather than replacing it.
Does this surprise anyone?
I think this is an extensive conversation that needs to take place in educational spaces. One way that I combat the downside of AI is eliminating the "boogey man" cloak it's usually draped in when brought up. I discuss the pros and cons of AI in my classroom, utilize it as a tool with my students, and train them to use it as a learning tool --- never a replacement of research, thinking, etc. This is the short answer, but I hope more people continue the conversation so we can use AI as the tool and not the "thinker".
The tool-removal studies are the part that should worry people most, and they also settle a question sitting underneath this whole debate. A skill that disappears when the tool is taken away was never transferred to the student. It was rented. That is the line between offloading and dependency, and your own evidence runs it: the gains vanish on removal, so this is dependency, not a quiet trade of detail-level skill for higher-level skill.
Which is why the same tool does opposite things depending on timing. Someone who built the foundation and now offloads detail to work at a higher level is multiplying a skill they own. A student who offloads before building it never forms the skill at all. Same behavior, opposite result. The teacher who said "multiplication tables before the calculator" had the whole thing.
The harder question is what mass education was actually built to produce. If the honest answer is a trustworthy signal of capability for employers, more than learning for its own sake, then AI is not only degrading learning. It is degrading the signal. A degree was valuable because it was expensive to fake. Once it is cheap to fake, it stops carrying information, and some of the panic about thinking is really alarm about a signal collapsing. That does not make the alarm wrong. It makes it deeper.
I ran almost this exact structure on professional sport recently, another system whose stated purpose and real function have quietly come apart. Different system, same question. What does it actually run on, and what is it spending to keep going?
This feels like the practical edge of the question: not whether students can produce answers faster, but whether school still gives them enough practice becoming people who can think without the tool.
I’m a retired educator and technologist and appreciate the thoughtfulness of this essay. And I would like to push further into the next steps. We cannot pretend like AI doesn’t exist. Schools can tailor or prohibit AI on publicly owned devices but let’s be clear, those students have devices at home that are unrestricted that they will use in lieu of their school-issued device and there will be no restraining their use.
So let’s convene a cohort of intellectual leaders and creative problem solvers to develop the tools and skills in teachers so that we CAN let them lead AI lessons in the classroom that will ensure our developing young minds actually learn to control the tool rather than let the tool control them. That’s the goal. As one of your quotes said, learning how to use AI could allow student to go deeper more rapidly…but the alternative is also that we’re talking about kids in K12 whose prefrontal cortices are undeveloped and whose impulse control is virtually nil… it won’t be easy, but learning how and when to control the use of AI in education is of the most critical importance and I look forward to being part of the solution. I’m Chris Lewis and I’m running for School Board in. A Beach and I hope that I can be a thought provoker who brings out the questions that we need answered and that follows with action by our professional curriculum developers who can build the next generation of curriculum and empower teachers to be keepers of the flame of technology so that we don’t bury our heads in the sand but hold them high as we nurture our next generation of digital citizens.
Expected. Time to reconsider schools legitimacy in the current firm though
Another possible factor is the disruption to early childhood learning by COVID