Another AI tutor, designed to give hints rather than answers, improved performance without most of the later damage.⁸
One helped students think. The other made it easier not to.
I don’t think schools should ban AI. That would be like banning calculators or the internet and hoping the world goes away. But children need to know when the machine is helping them and when it is doing the thinking for them.
They can’t make that judgment from a position of ignorance.
The less we know, the smarter AI looks.
That brings me back to a very old-fashioned idea. Children still need to read books, write clearly, understand numbers, know some science and have a sense of history, geography and government.
Not because they need to memorize everything. Nobody can. But they need enough knowledge to notice when something doesn’t add up.
A child who knows no history is helpless when a machine invents one. A child who doesn’t understand percentages may not recognize a bad loan. A child who has never worked through a difficult text may accept the first smooth summary offered.
Children should also make things.
They should cook, measure, build, wire and repair. There is value in discovering that a shelf is level or it isn’t, regardless of how persuasively you explain what you meant to do.
That is one reason I’m not persuaded by the argument over college versus the trades.
My son is a master elevator mechanic and a master welder. He has built electric bikes for fun. His work isn’t a refuge from technology. It is technology with consequences.
A modern elevator combines machinery, electricity, software, sensors and safety systems. It may also sit in an old building containing several generations of repairs, some of them undocumented and a few of them probably best forgotten.
A robot may weld a standard joint or drill a row of holes. That is different from walking into an unfamiliar building, figuring out why a system failed, fitting new equipment to old and deciding whether people will be safe.
Robotics will change that work. AI will change law, medicine, engineering, journalism and nearly everything else. I don’t know which jobs will disappear first or what the replacements will look like. Neither does anyone else.
What seems fairly clear is that the useful person will be the one who understands enough of the system to recognize the problem, ask the right question and know when the machine’s answer is wrong.
So I don’t think the answer is college or trades. Children need enough education to understand the world, some experience making and fixing real things, and the chance to become genuinely good at something.
We should probably also stop testing learning only while it is fresh. Bring the material back six months later. Ask students to solve a problem that doesn’t look like the homework. Let them use AI on some projects, then ask what it contributed, what it got wrong and what the student finally decided.
That would tell us more than another practice test.
I keep coming back to Kwendolyn.
The fourth-grader who went back into the passage to find evidence would now be about 21. We don’t know whether she continued reading. We don’t know whether she can compare two loans, understand an employment contract, follow a technical manual or recognize when an AI system has produced a beautifully written lie.
Nor should one young woman have to stand as proof of an entire state’s reform. A state average is not a biography.