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.
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
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.
You mean to tell me young people lack wisdom?
There are many brilliant, driven young people I have worked with who are thoughtful, curious, and moreover empathetic individuals. Most young people I’d argue possess varying degrees of the aforementioned qualities. Unfortunately the media ecosystem too many of them find themselves in – especially young men – push anti-intellectualism and offer conspiracy and reactionary nonsense in lieu of encouraging critical thinking. Deferring to AI, especially when men positioned as tech heroes, pioneers, success stories (billionaires) support and laud the technology becomes the obvious choice over the bookish professors in their ivory towers. I’m not saying academia has all the answers as it clearly does not, but it is scary and saddening to see the damage already being done with people taking medical advice (as one example) from TikTok or AI.
This is why we generally don’t let children design the curriculum.
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.
Proof of the difficulty and value is how much they ate spending to train ai to be able to do similar, but poorly.