What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?
Whether parents and educators like it or not, A.I. has infiltrated American classrooms, Jessica Winter reports.
Each week, our editors select a New Yorker story for you to read: something timely, something important, or something unexpected—or even, perhaps, all three. To support journalism like this, consider subscribing.
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?
The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite.
I don’t like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I’ve been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I.-image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn’t going anywhere—in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town—so just try your best not to engage.
Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids’ schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school. In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack which read “Certificate of Completion, ” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student “designs” a cartoon dancer and “remixes” a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.
For more: What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either
Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.
So many times, so many times, I warned her about the creepy neighbor. Now he reads her poems and knows her passwords. He’s always watching through the screen.
No single company has a monopoly on A.I. in K-8 education. In Boston’s public schools, sixth graders used chatbots powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to prepare for this year’s statewide standardized tests. In New York’s and Los Angeles’s school districts, among others, kindergartners talk to a gamified reading bot called Amira, which records children’s voices in order to provide A.I.-driven feedback. A public-school parent in Brooklyn told me about a second-grade art class in which the students can cook up A.I. slop using Adobe Express for Education. When a group of fourth graders in Los Angeles used the same Adobe program to design a Pippi Longstocking book cover, it spat out highly sexualized images.
Google has an institutional advantage over its A.I. competitors in the form of the Chromebook and its built-in “learning management system,” Google Classroom. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as school districts scrambled to set up remote learning, many of them found a cheap and easy option in the Chromebook, which strikes me as little more than a slow browser connected to a janky trackpad. A report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group noted that, by the last quarter of 2020, year-on-year sales of the device were up by two hundred and eighty-seven per cent. In a national survey conducted by the Times last November, about eighty per cent of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks, which has created a vast captive market for Gemini and helped make A.I. in schools a near-universal prospect.
For more: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
Support for generative A.I. in elementary and middle schools clusters around the belief that early exposure to the technology will foster digital-media literacy, give students a foundation in engineering concepts, and prepare them for a future in which most professions are steeped in A.I. Proponents say that teachers can use A.I. to save time on grading papers and tedious administrative tasks; they also tout the adaptive-learning aspects of A.I. tools, which adjust in real time to a child’s progress and, by producing troves of data, help teachers give individualized attention to each student. “One of the core things that we think about when we bring A.I. to education institutions is: How do you put the educator at the center of that experience?” Shantanu Sinha, who is one of the V.P.s of Google for Education, told me. Gemini’s aim, Sinha went on, is to “empower the educators” in “creating richer experiences. We are not the pedagogical experts.”
Other advocates suggest that A.I. might eliminate the need for pedagogical expertise altogether. Alpha, a fast-growing private-school chain that employs “guides” instead of teachers and serves children as young as four, claims that it “harnesses the power of AI technology to provide each student with personalized 1:1 learning,” allowing kids to “crush academics in just 2 hours” per day, according to its website. At a recent White House summit on children and tech, Melania Trump appeared alongside Figure 03, a humanoid contraption by the robotics company Figure AI, which looks, sounds, and moves as if Eve from “WALL-E” had mated with an arthritic Imperial Stormtrooper. The First Lady asked her audience to imagine such an A.I.-powered robot as a teacher, one who is “always patient and always available” to its student. This lucky pupil will learn more quickly and have more time for friends and sports, Trump said; he or she will become “a more complete person.” Figure 03’s face is literally a black screen: a robotic balaclava.
The message from the White House—and, often, from tech companies and public schools—is that Figure 03 and its A.I. militia are irreversibly here, and belong everywhere, and we should feel terrified but also “empowered,” and that the more time and resources we hand over to them the less they will hurt us, hopefully, maybe. Last month, New York City’s Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using A.I. in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: “The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder.”
It’s quite the rhetorical suplex—opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits. But, as we know from hallucinating chatbots, saying something doesn’t make it so. Countless studies have sown doubt about the place of A.I. in pedagogical settings. “The integration of LLMs into learning environments,” a 2025 study out of M.I.T. cautioned, “may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy.” (The authors appended an F.A.Q. to the paper with instructions on how to discuss its findings: “Please do not use the words like ‘stupid’, ‘dumb’, ‘brain rot’, ‘harm’, ‘damage’, ‘brain damage’, ‘passivity’, ‘trimming’ and so on.”)
More recently, Education Week published findings from an analysis of data from some thirteen hundred U.S. school districts, which found that about one in five student interactions with generative A.I. “involved cheating, self-harm, bullying, and other problematic behaviors.” This month, a study by researchers from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, U.C.L.A., and the University of Oxford showed that people who used L.L.M.s on fraction-solving math problems and then lost access to A.I. assistance “perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. . . . These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.” (This research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.) And, at the start of the year, the Brookings Institution released a “premortem on AI and children’s education,” which paired analysis of about four hundred research studies with hundreds of interviews with students, parents, educators, and technologists, and concluded that A.I. tools “undermine children’s foundational development.”
Also from The New Yorker:
The cognitive atrophy argument is real, really grave, and it runs deeper than academic performance. What happens to human perception when attention is outsourced? The antenna weakens. Then it stops recognising its own.
And the answer isn't removing AI. There's always a happy medium. But it requires a practiced perception that most people have never been taught. When the antenna is strong, you use AI as a tool without becoming dependent on it. When it isn't, the tool uses you.
Rare Attention™ is a philosophy for creatives, and a foundational perceptual literacy for parents and educators — the kind that should be taught in homes and classrooms before any AI tool is introduced. Strong antenna first. Then the technology. Not the other way around.
The girl who preferred her own slide show already knows. That instinct is the antenna working. The goal is to protect it.
For anyone interested, here's the link from the start: https://anliette.substack.com/p/this-may-be-the-antidote-to-ai-culture
Jessica Winter’s 'creepy neighbor' metaphor is a masterclass in poisoning the well. By framing A.I. through the lens of a predatory stranger before the first paragraph is even over, she shuts down any honest debate about pedagogy. It’s easy to find 'slop' when you’re looking for it, but to dismiss the potential for personalized, adaptive learning based on a third-grade dance game is a classic hasty generalization. Let’s trade the gothic horror for some grounded logic, shall we?