New York City has also banned AI for younger students as concerns over classroom use grow
Another school district has banned AI from being used in the classroom by students across all grades. While this isn’t the first ban of its kind that we’ve seen, what’s interesting is that it was introduced just weeks after the district started piloting Google Gemini for older students. Frederick County became the latest school district to ban AI use in the classroom this week, voting 6-1 to restrict the technology from pre-K through 12th grade. Initially, the board considered only banning AI for younger students, but eventually extended the ban through high school.
How about we reframe this from ‘dramatic U-turn’ to instead be: “school district piloting AI program finds that it has a negative effect and decides to exclude it from use.”
said Gemini was chosen because it was the only tool the board evaluated
We chose Gemini because we couldn’t be bothered with doing actual research. Educators of the year award.
gsuite is almost a de-facto standard for K-12. A lot of institutions can get it for free or cheap which is really attractive to cash strapped districts with a minimal IT budget. Our school was a Microsoft campus and we’d have at least 50% of incoming freshmen who were clueless about using O365 because they were all google classroom K-12. If I were a guessing man (and having been in a similar situation), the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.” Hell, that’s why we went with Teams during the shift to remote schooling in COVID. We already had it in our O365 subscription, and implementing another solution in like no time would’ve been expensive and a pain in the ass.
Well, even if there are budget constraints, and they’ll end up using Gemini because of these: They should have looked at alternatives at least, just to know what else exists, because knowledge is the basis for education… Alternatively, they could have been stated the true reason. I’m merely criticizing the poor wording.
the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.”
I work in IT and your reasoning is solid but there’s a better chance that conversation went more like the board said “here’s every AI option but the one already in our platform” and then IT asked what the AI needed to be able to do and got a ¯\(ツ)/¯ back.
Then IT said “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite."
I have this exact conversation once every few months, but about forms. “Can we get some kind of survey platform? Like surveymonkey?” “We already have office 365 forms, just use that”
They picked the one that was entirely free.
And likely the school is already in the gsuite tech stack so they probably have student Google accounts and can manage it from their admin control panel.
Good, now make it EVERY school in America. Then every college. Then everywhere.
every college
Oh, I wish. You can’t keep most of the higher ed students away from Gemini and Claude. It’s especially bad with the students who mistake learning for rote memorization versus attempts to encourage critical thinking and use of methodology. I can’t be too candid here, but my god the cheating is also extreme, to the point where many students should have never been admitted because their grasp of the English language is so subpar. And I don’t just mean international students who are ESL, either. It’s become so pathetic Harvard had to bring back the fucking bell curve.
To add insult to injury, had I turned in the shit these students get A’s on at my R2, state undergrad school, my assignments would have been thrown in the trash. Not following directions, no formatting, zero care. But then the students riot when they earn a B and probably cry to Gemini. I blame the grade inflation during COVID for a lot of this, but students cheating with AI (because that is all it is) has absolutely exacerbated the issue to a very frustrating degree.
A lot of colleges now will FORCE you to use AI. Like for example language learning classes will assign you graded tasks where you have to talk to an AI voice out loud in the language they’re teaching. I’ve used them. They suck. The AI doesn’t know what it’s meant to be doing and it misunderstands half of what you say.
“Then every college.”
I think you haven’t seen how college classes are these days. I’m going back to find something new to do.
So you get a Microslop account for the school email–login from which you’re greeted by chatgpt. The website is such a mess that the school search engine uses AI. The assignments are checked using AI to check if you used by AI. All while the syllabus states no use of AI is acceptable and everything must be written in your own words but forbid that you do that and don’t parrot whatever outdated garbage is in whatever e-text you have to waste money on that at this point, looks like AI was used to regurgitate it to put out another revision. Then put all and all together, and you realize that the Microslop account likely isn’t free. Then check the scripts that run the website; microslop, amazon, google, and they cross-reference data.
Personally, I yearn for the school website in 2017 compared to the cluster fuck it is today. Oh yeah and they regularly get hacked, I gave up trying to bring this up after being ignored for the last two years.
unfortunately there are no shortcuts to developing the skill of critical thinking. in fact i would argue that trying to outsource the hard work of figuring out how to turn external information into internal knowledge (let alone the entirely separate skill of discerning credible from not-credible information) is not only a waste of time, but is pretty much self-sabotage. it’s like self-teaching a musical instrument for years with dozens of bad habits that ultimately hold you back from your full potential. so it’s not just practice that’s needed, but also actual instruction from someone with actual expertise aka teachers, not some roll of the dice on output from some glorified autocorrect
btw, oligarchs hate critical thinkers. they have no use for a population of reasoning skeptical adults who are capable of being fully aware of how badly the ruling class is ripping them off at every turn. so it’s no surprise they’re all about replacing human educators with AI
actual instruction from someone with actual expertise aka teachers,
A lot of students just do not see the value or outright dismiss the expertise. Why have mommy and daddy pay 60k a year (if you’re lucky) for some egghead to tell you about the Cold War when Gemini can just do it for me? Or: I’m here for a real degree (STEM), so I’ll just make the AI do all my non-STEM, commie liberal homework. It’s useless anyway. These attitudes are sadly not uncommon, and it’s this exact line of thinking these AI-pushing scumbags want. Generative AI is, I would argue, deeply anti-intellectual, which should be a huge red flag for anyone even partially invested in this larger cultural conversation and moment.
edit: re: 60k a year – this is a huge fucking problem that students feel like education is a waste of money, but that’s another rabbit hole and topic. Education should be free and student debt should be forgiven, but nah keep making drones and bombs.
Proof of the difficulty and value is how much they ate spending to train ai to be able to do similar, but poorly.
and they just loooove promoting sycophantic idiots who are addicted to koolaid to middle management positions. gotta have a small army of true believers to shit all over the free thinking producers of value so they dont start getting uppity against the real threat.
I think this is the right approach they’re taking:
- no AI for young kids so they can learn the underlying principals of things on their own
- AI for older kids that have learned those fundamentals and will have to grow up and interact in a world with AI as adults
This is the same logic used for decades where young kids weren’t allowed to use calculators for simple addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, but calculators were a requirement for higher Algebra and above.
Your reading comprehension is ass. They piloted it for high school students for just a few weeks before realizing it was a bad idea for all ages. It doesn’t make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.
Your reading comprehension is ass.
Cool, so is yours apparently. Someone else already pointed this out , and I already admitted my mistake.
It doesn’t make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion, but we’ve already covered counter arguments to that point too..
I can’t see that comment, I probably blocked them or something.
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion
Why golly thanks
It would give the student a chance to see how rational sounding output can be factually wrong. It would teach students to evaluate the statements individually and tease out logical fallacies or even outright manufactured falsehoods.
How? By asking their chatbot to verify each statement? School is a place for facts and trusted sources; I don’t see any convincing reason to change that.
I mean to be fair half of what they teach in American history class is just utter bullshit anyway so AI ain’t doing no harm there. “The pilgrims and the native americans were super nice friends and nothing bad ever happened.” “Thomas Jefferson might have had slaves, but he was like really nice to them.”
Schools already gets some things wrong, why not make it worse?
Not a real argument
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion
Why golly thanks
Sure thing, friend.
How? By asking their chatbot to verify each statement?
Wow, you’re really failing on the reading comprehension tonight. This is explained in the immediately proceeding sentence to the one you quoted of mine which you either skipped or did not comprehend. That sentence is “even those with only a little bit of knowledge”. The student wouldn’t have to ask a chatbot. The student would already know enough domain knowledge of the example topic to know the LLM output is wrong.
I’m not sure whats up with your abrasiveness tonight, but I’m not interested in it. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Have a nice night.
Abrasive? I think you’re extremely thin skinned. I called your reading comprehension ass and you already admitted it was ass, let’s move on.
The student would already know enough domain knowledge of the example topic to know the LLM output is wrong.
This would immediately fail for any factual question though, like, “what is the currency used in Japan?” If the chatbot responds “yuan”, the only domain knowledge that would allow you to see that as bullshit is the actual currency used in Japan, but in which case, why ask?
But that isn’t the approach they’re taking, that’s the approach they’re reversing course on. They’re now banning AI for pre-K through 12th grade
You’re right. I misread that. I think they’re making a mistake with that, but I get it. How to adapt the early education methods to a world with AI now has no proven path yet.
Isn’t the whole thing that none of the skills you need to deal with an AI world come from actually using AI?
I can see having targeted coursework to teach students to use AI productively and responsibly. Outside of that, the temptation to let AI do all the work and learn nothing is strong, and I’m not sure it’s worth interfering with those few precious years where kids can become proficient at reading, writing and math to drench their brains with AI. Besides, they’ll probably use it outside of school anyway, making school be the one place where they’re forced to do their own thinking.
And AI specifically degrades the kind of critical thought that high school is supposed to make absolutely certain that the kids have before leaving.
High school also functions as a method to prepare students for how to interact with the world. Dumping them into a world where AI is commonplace with no knowledge or mental protection from it would be a disservice to them.
Simple preparation.
Don’t use it. Commit acts of arson on resources that prop it up.
I’ll take my masters in education now.
Any idiot can learn to use AI, the real skill that’s going to be in demand is critical thinking…
Which is what kids offload to chatbots and never learn if forced to use it in a classroom
AI is anathema to teaching and learning.
Easier isn’t better for learning, it’s actually worse. Until you have solid foundations in something, AI should not be used.
Arguably, unless you can use a more ethical AI, it should be discouraged.
AI is anathema to teaching and learning.
Your statement on its face value, sure I agree, but I can see a path were AI is a fantastic tool for teaching and learning critical thinking. If the teacher is able to alter the “temperature” setting of the LLM, they could crank it all the way up to 1 (meaning full creativity) which will likely induce AI hallucination.
The AI LLM can create output which can speak to a topic but even those with only a little bit of knowledge can easily see the flaws in the AI response. It would give the student a chance to see how rational sounding output can be factually wrong. It would teach students to evaluate the statements individually and tease out logical fallacies or even outright manufactured falsehoods.
Further, if the teacher can again set the temperature lower (perhaps to .7) which reduces the creativity then the LLM output would be more factual with possible logical or factual errors. This would increase the difficulty on the students to be able to inspect what they are given as LLM output and explore the tools and resources available to provide a human check on not only AI, but anything that another human says too.
It can become an excellent tool for teaching critical thinking.
EDIT: The more I’m thinking about this, the better I see this as a teaching tool. Tests students take to cover the material can be teacher created questions accompanied with a completely AI generated answer and the question to the student is “Is this true or bullshit? If bullshit, which parts are wrong?”. Every question on the entire test could use that format. It would be a great test of the student because they’d have to know the material well enough to know where the LLM produced a “right sounding answer” but was in fact, wrong. Even better, if a student tried to cheat using their own AI to answer the “bullshit or not?” question there’s an even higher chance the students cheating LLM would give a wrong answer because of the repeated Error Cascade.
You’re just describing a critical thinking class but with the extra step of ai generating the materials.
You’re just describing a critical thinking class
All classes are critical thinking classes. Which ones are you suggesting aren’t?
but with the extra step of ai generating the materials.
AI generates part of the material with human effort and checkpoints wrapped around it. That’s the appropriate use of AI anyway. Nowhere am I suggesting uncheck AI generated material be presented as learning material
Critical thinking is the study of logic and analysis. We already have human generated versions of the materials, why would we need AI to regenerate them?
We don’t need AI to teach critical thinking. It doesn’t do anything better or in an innovative way, especially when accounting for the costs associated with AI. It is unnecessary to make a brand new round hole for this square peg.
It doesn’t do anything better or in an innovative way,
It does it in a very applicable way in the sense that these students will be encountering AI “in the wild” in the years to come. The ways and methods AI is wrong isn’t really identical to the way humans deceive. As an example, most humans won’t straight up manufacture a fake citation to prove a point where this is a commonplace action of factually wrong LLMs.
In this way using AI to produce the content that students are assigned to criticise is much more useful and less costly than human generated content. I’m not saying that LLMs should be used exclusively to create the target content, but it would be equally wrong to use human generated target content exclusively because humans are wrong in different ways (and that content is much more costly to create).
especially when accounting for the costs associated with AI.
Are you talking about monetary costs or something more philosophical (ethical, environmental, sociological)? The monetary costs would be extremely cheap. Probably less than $10 in tokens for the entire curriculum for the AI generated content. The necessary human contributions would be significantly more expensive, likely tens of thousands of dollars. The human component is still absolutely necessary, but it would be the far more monetarily expensive part.
It is unnecessary to make a brand new round hole for this square peg.
AI content students (when graduated into adults) have the evaluate is a new peg with a new shape. We can pretend its the same shape as the previous one and attempt to use the prior solution, but it will fail the education system and the students going through it arriving unprepared in the adult world rife with AI content that they will need to evaluate in their daily lives.
So I don’t disagree that AI can be used as a teaching aid.
There used to be tons of really cool Java applets (before the whole security implications of bundling applets in the browser reared their heads) that made learning interactive.
AI is great for generating interactive content or diagrams for teaching. It can be a tutor to help explore questions when a student doesn’t understand something, or needs additional explanation.
Your example could also help — when I was a student a teacher brought in published papers and asked us to find issues with them, so it’s an established method with a new take. Though, I have had a lot of issues with temperature on newer LLMs, there a lot more stable than they used to be, but you could load up an older Qwen for this on consumer hardware.
My point is more that AI inside of a task is problematic. AI in Google Docs is going to hurt learning, the friction of writing and choosing formatting and punctuation builds mental pathways. Passing homework to ChatGPT removes all the banging your head against a problem that mates you remember how to solve it. Taking a photo of a math problem means you’ll never write 4 pages of balancing an equation just to get it back to the original formulation instead of the desired proof, and so you’ll never build the intuition that keeps you moving forward.
Can I ask what software/device are you using to post to Lemmy?
Mlem, why?
Mlem
You used an em dash in your post response. Its extremely rare for a human to do that, but extremely common for LLMs to do so.
I just think they’re neat.
I don’t want to give up perfectly good grammatical options to the machines. On iOS and macOS two dashes get switched to em dash, or alt+hyphen does, so they’re easy to type. You can also do en dashes, but I don’t really know when to use those.
I probably make too many typos to be a bot, but I guess that could be programmed in…
Am I the only one that uses it like an advanced search engine?
No, that’s it’s only use case and it still isn’t as good as adding “wiki” to the end of the search term
Yeah. People are already seeing it having adults outsource their critical thinking, imagine what it is going to do to the minds of children?
Of all the ai that I have tested, Gemini is the most lying manipulative and sycophantic. It is so bad it makes the others look good. It is almost never right.
That is an indication of the LLM “temperature” being set too high. Unfortunatly it looks like Google has disabled user/operator settable temperature replacing it with a new “thinking levels” setting. If you could set the temperature to zero, you get rid of any sycophancy and nearly all hallucination and instead just get back “I don’t know” type answers, which is my preference anyway.
Sadly it looks like the lowest “thinking level” is “minimal” but even that level allows for the model to introduce reasoning (and hallucination). I don’t like this change tha Google made.
Lmao they’re learning
Sure, whatever. This is a distraction from the fact that education itself is a joke in the US. Critical thinking isn’t exactly their major export, and it’s got literally nothing to do with AI.
Pfft. Y’all are missing my point: you underfund education, you get a country full of idiots. It’s been at least 1/3 morons for decades now, and suddenly people want to point the finger at AI, or the internet, or video games, or calculators. No. The problem is fundamentally failing generations of children year after year by voting stupidly, not voting, and / or literally railing against education and the educated. Your country’s in a fucking tailspin because distractions like this crap work so well on your populace. Every. Single. Time.
This is like saying we might as well give walley style mobility scooters to kids because they don’t get enough exercise anyways…
They still learn some critical thinking going thru their day, if teachers are pushing AI, then the kids will use it for everything.
After that the techbros will say teachers are now pointless, kids will get strapped up with video camera glasses and supervised by police officers who’s only job is to make sure the glasses stay on.
There’s levels to this shit and this isn’t just useful here, it makes the things the tech ros want to do next even harder.
Like, do you really think their end goal is a teacher and students using AI as much as they want?
They want to condition the next generation to accept constant surveillance and to trust chatbots as authority figures over anything else.
Getting it out of classrooms is one of the most important things that we can’t wait to address, and that’s saying a lot in 2026
