What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?

According to Google, Anthropic, Amazon, or most any other tech giant, artificial intelligence belongs in classrooms. They say it will make education more “efficient,” teachers’ experiences “richer,” and the work students produce more “impressive.” But research indicates that AI poses serious risks to children’s cognitive and social development. Jessica Winter, a self-declared AI hater, finds that resistance to AI in education is mounting:

Amy Finn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told me that “part of the magic of how kids learn is that they have less knowledge of what they’re going to experience and fewer expectations about what’s going to be relevant. They don’t have that adult filter of strategically extracting things from their experience, and so they retain a lot of unexpected details that adults would find irrelevant. That allows them to be creative in ways that adults are not creative.” The child brain’s tendency toward delightful non sequitur and unpredictable meanderings is not aligned with an L.L.M.’s orientation toward speed and sleekness and summary, toward frictionless, rational outcomes. (An obsession with outcomes-over-process is also a hallmark of the universally loathed style of instruction known as “teaching to the test,” which began taking hold in American classrooms in the early two-thousands, after the No Child Left Behind Act tied federal funding to standardized assessments.)