A few weeks ago, my ears perked up when a gaggle of middle school volleyball players in my car were talking about the teachers they don’t like; I have an unfortunate appetite for tweenage gossip, and sometimes it yields relevant information. Most of it was petty: One has a resting angry face, another is too strict at lunch. But then somebody said, dismissively: “And I bet she uses A.I. to grade our papers.”
I don’t think this is true, but that it could be true is already corrosive. Even seventh graders can see artificial intelligence is a lesser form of care and attention. And now unregulated A.I. has the potential to chip away at their trust of the educational process, from the moment they start kindergarten.
The push for A.I. in K-12 schools is now coming from the president, who released an executive order on April 23 calling for use of the technology in all grades. Secretary of education Linda McMahon has previously said her goal is getting the federal government out of education, sending control back to the states and empowering parents, but apparently there’s a carveout for nudging Big Tech’s continued incursion into the classroom.
The executive order claims that “A.I. education in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) is critical” because the United States needs “to develop an A.I.-ready work force and the next generation of American A.I. innovators.” The executive order commands the secretary of education to also “prioritize the use of A.I. in discretionary grant programs for teacher training” so that they might “integrate the fundamentals of A.I. into all subject areas.”
Personally, I do not trust McMahon to responsibly administer anything having to do with A.I. when she repeatedly confused A.I. with A1, the steak sauce, in a speech earlier this year: “A school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have A1 teaching in every year. That’s a wonderful thing!”
There are already many schools across the country that are integrating A.I. into the curriculum, though I fear that in many places it’s being done without appropriate forethought or data privacy safeguards. “What I can say with a fairly high level of confidence is that A.I. is being forced upon schools without any particular context or funding that would allow them to make informed decisions about what may or may not be valuable to them,” said Alex Molnar, the director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.
If A.I. is carelessly incorporated all the way down to pre-K, it would be a horrible mistake. It could inhibit children’s critical thinking and literacy skills, and damage their trust in the learning process and in one another. As my newsroom colleagues reported last week in a story called “A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse,” the hallucinations may always exist. But even more to the point, when we automate the most connective human tasks, like teaching, and relegate that to systems that can get basic facts wrong, it can lead to rot all the way down.
And for what? Research takes time, but for now there is not even conclusive evidence that A.I. improves learning outcomes when compared with human teaching of older students. One study of nearly 1,000 Turkish high schoolers from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania compared two groups of students who were allowed access to different versions of OpenAI’s GPT-4 when studying for a math exam with a control group of students who had no generative A.I. resources. Students with access to generative A.I. did much better on practice tests where they could use the A.I. But when all of the students were given an exam with no access to A.I., the control group with old-school study resources outperformed the group who studied with A.I.
Over the past week, I heard from many parents across the country about their views on A.I. in the classroom. I could not find one person who supported its use in elementary school, even among parents who used A.I. at home to generate creative work with their kids. (One dad explained how he and his children write poetry with large language models, and it sounded charming.) Many of them told me that when they asked school administrators questions about data privacy protections in the A.I. programs already in use, they were not given straight answers.
Cambron Wright of Kentucky, who has three kids under 7 and a fourth child due soon, put it bluntly: “Adding A.I. to ed tech would be an unmitigated disaster on a social, spiritual and educational level.” His oldest child attends public school, and Wright describes himself as a conservative Christian. He added, “Even beyond politics, who among all political stripes wants their children to be taught by robots? Does it get any more dystopian?”
Karen Friedman, the mother of two teenagers in New Jersey public schools, said that she has seen the effects of a technology-soaked learning process for her children, and she’s not impressed. Her older child is a junior in high school, and “her grade was the first in our district to have one-to-one technology from kindergarten — meaning before she could write, my daughter was placed in front of a computer and was learning Google Suite,” Friedman said.
In general, outside the classroom, Friedman thinks A.I. slop, or shoddy content, is exacerbating a natural teen “tendency toward cynicism and social mistrust.” And in the classroom? “A.I. encourages surface perfectionism without developing the tools and stamina necessary for true critical thinking,” she said.
While the A.I. executive order states as an objective preparing kids for an A.I.-dominated job market, I don’t know how that could be the case. Nobody knows how A.I. is going to affect jobs going forward, and corporations are still figuring out exactly how they’re integrating the technology into their workflow. Despite rampant use of A.I. among college students today, there is some fear that the technology is actually dampening the job market — and it’s hard to come up with fresh solutions or innovative new businesses if you’re outsourcing so much of your thinking. If A.I. is going to destroy jobs anyway, students might as well actually learn to use their brains for the fun of it.
I feel like a broken record saying this, but I still cannot believe that after living through the school closures of 2020-21, our policymakers continue to underestimate the importance of human connection, especially in primary school. Parents definitely understand how important social development is, and according to a Gallup poll from March, many parents feel their children are still struggling: “45 percent of parents of school-age children say the pandemic has had a negative impact on their child’s social skills development. Half of them, 22 percent, report the social difficulty is ongoing.”
Putting more screens in our classrooms is not going to automatically lead to a smarter, healthier or better employed population. And parents of all backgrounds need to stand up and shout it now.
Despite what some tech leaders say, nothing about A.I. is inevitable. Humans are making decisions about its use every day, and we need to convince the ones in charge of our schools — especially our elementary schools — that the zealous embrace of the latest tech is not the way forward.
End Notes
-
Mark Zuckerberg thinks A.I. friends are a solution to a desire for more human connection. “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he said. In 2024 I wrote about how A.I. “friends” are not the solution to loneliness, because the emotion is actually a signal to go out into the world and connect with humans.
-
It’s really tough to believe that the current administration cares about the education of young children, as it’s taken a wrecking ball to Head Start, which provides preschool and child care to low-income Americans. My friend Jessica Winter gets into it in The New Yorker, noting that “During the first quarter of 2025, Head Start received nearly a billion fewer dollars from its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, than it did last year during the same time period — a drop of about 37 percent.”
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post A.I. Starting in Pre-K Would Be an ‘Unmitigated Disaster’ appeared first on New York Times.
