“The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” So begins Bill Gates, calling for the world to wise up to the risks we face as the technology rapidly approaches capabilities beyond human imagination and control.
It is not hyperbole to say that the stakes are high. The Pope has warned about the erosion of human ability to think. An Anthropic researcher publicly quit, citing concerns that the AI industry is acting recklessly given the “civilizational stakes” of its work. Leaders of the nation’s top AI companies appear to agree that the technology is potentially catastrophic, warranting a slowdown.
As a parent who watched tech leaders defend their predatory practices in a series of lawsuits over the past few months, I find this new call for safeguards among competing tech titans almost too hard to process.
It took well over a decade to see the alarming impact of smartphones, social media, and school-issued devices on children, and longer still to demand action to protect students from harmful effects. We clearly can’t wait that long on AI.
Alongside device bans and restrictions, school districts are racing to develop AI use policies—first piecemeal and now expansive. In New York City, the mayor announced a moratorium on student-facing AI use through eighth grade. District administrators in Los Angeles went further, apparently surprising even school board members with their total ban.
But AI use is about much more than whether a child can access Gemini on their Chromebook at school. In addition to increasingly clear impacts on learning, AI use raises complex questions about honesty, judgment, and whether struggling through difficult work has inherent value separate from the final product. Parents who believe a child’s moral education starts at home need to engage in conversations about when and how—or if—the technology should be used.
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My eighth-grade daughter is taking “Humanities” this fall, an elective that apparently used to involve watching a lot of movies before a language arts teacher filled a last-minute vacancy and was given free rein to adjust the class as he saw fit. At back-to-school night, he discussed how our children are constantly inundated with media and shared his desire to help them learn how to view content with appropriate skepticism. (Amen!)
The teacher described a shift among students and families; it’s a change I’ve observed as well. Parents are more cautious about screen time, or at least more aware. Kids themselves know that social media is harmful (though they don’t stop using it when left to their own devices). My oldest child, born just as smartphones entered the chat and now a college freshman, went through the hollowed-out, tech-filled, high school experience described in Fordham’s report on high school in the age of distraction. For my youngest child, in her last year of elementary school, teachers seem noticeably more cautious about technology in their classrooms. Instead of seeking out ways to incorporate tech, they ask whether the task works without it.
This “techlash” is taking hold across the country. In Lower Merion Township, outside Philadelphia, parents are suing to retain the right to opt their children out of mandatory tech use in the classroom. Los Angeles preceded its new AI-ban with a sweeping screen-time policy passed over the summer, developed largely in response to parent demands. After years of heated conflict over partisan-coded issues like book bans and preferred pronouns, school leaders are hearing from parents across the political spectrum who don’t want their children sitting in front of screens all day, doing who knows what.
Action on screen time, driven by consensus, is a welcome development. Yet limiting the number of minutes a child spends on their school-issued device does not resolve the difficult questions—more moral than technical—that come with an AI future.
Toward the end of our seven-minute block together at back-to-school night, my daughter’s teacher turned to AI and his enthusiasm disappeared. He was visibly disturbed by the dual reality that our children will live with AI tools and thus should know how to use them, while it is clear that the technology erodes cognitive development in ways we are only beginning to understand.
AI increases academic efficiency on certain assignments. Students may earn better grades for less work, but a recent analysis of closed-book test scores confirms that students using AI are not obtaining knowledge along the way. Meanwhile, some teachers are producing AI slop lesson plans and feedback, undermining student effort in exactly the moment when kids need to understand that effort is at the center of real learning, not the production of a polished final product.
The technology is changing faster than any state, district, school, or teacher can update their policies and procedures, which makes it exceptionally difficult to define what type of AI use constitutes cheating. Is it really that different from spell-check or a calculator? (Yes!) And even if kids want to avoid AI, their perceptions of peer use mean that every assignment brings a moral reckoning over whether the cost to not use AI is too high.
Few kids are prepared to fully grapple with these ethical concerns, especially when few adults can even begin to develop and articulate shared norms over how and when AI should be used.
As parents, our job is to support the development of our child’s moral compass, cognitive growth, and intellectual curiosity. At a minimum, we can ask our children about AI use and stay aware of their schools’ and teachers’ policies. We can push our kids to think about how and when technology should be used, and what happens when their moral convictions or family rules come in conflict with what others consider appropriate use. We can stress how shortcuts are limiting, even if peers take them to get ahead in the short term. Better—we can do all these things in partnership with the educators who guide their learning for many hours each day.
Children need to learn how to navigate technology with the confidence that they can reason, appreciate, converse, and serve their communities in distinctly human ways. Building this confidence requires teaching kids to work hard and think independently, without reliance on powerful tools that adults don’t fully understand and that their creators may not be able to control. Pressing “pause” on AI in schools is necessary but insufficient. Today’s students will not know a world without this new technology, and it’s up to the adults in their lives to equip them with the human capacity to debate and decide how it should be used.
