Do they? I mean so much of learning (certainly of school) is along the lines of "this is the way it is, don't worry about first principles just accept this"
If there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.
Thank you Mayor Mamdani and the DSA. This is a major win for keeping children from losing their minds, retaining education quality, and promoting socialization.
The ban goes through eighth grade, and in high school apparently there's a specific AI literacy class. It's unclear from the article if that's the only AI in high school or it's just unregulated.
My opinion: it's a good policy and frankly just common sense.
- Students using AI risk offloading their cognition onto the AI and thereby skipping the actual learning process.
- Teachers using AI likewise do a disservice to the students.
In the middle of all that, there may actually be a version of AI that can help people learn without incurring the major downsides, but I've not seen any evidence of that in the current AI systems, to the point that an outright ban in the school setting makes sense. I'm heartened to see more education organizations think similarly [1].
There are so many things as a kid I did not agree with or understand but was forced to do anyway, and now as an adult am glad. Right down to being forced to wear a hat and sunscreen (in Australia).
If I had ChatGPT as a kid I would have learned nothing.
a lot of these studies with technology, etc, are concerned with outcomes in primary/secondary(high) school, which, tbf, no one gives a fuck about, as life outcomes are what matters
i know many who sucked at high school testing and accomplished great feats on their own academically and otherwise
Seems premature but then again humans are always a bit skiddish around change
Still, not shocking that the DSA stronghold that elected someone like Mamdani is going to be passionate against AI.
Will be interesting to watch outcomes diverge over the next few years. If you’re gonna ban stuff, do it at local levels like this so we can see differences play out across many locations/districts.
You bring up politics when this topic is about technology adoption in education.
Grew up in Greece and was shocked that calculators are used in high school math.
An interesting note: "And teachers will not be able to ask A.I. to grade assignments." This prevents teachers from using it as well, which is an interesting angle.
It can become political, like anything else. But isn't inherently. It does not attempt to answer some political or ideological question.
The question is "do you want to teach the tool and its use or do you want to teach thinking manually". The west is under the impression that if you don't teach the tool then people will be unemployable.
They will be teaching AI in high school. This ban is only for the lower grades.
Even when they teach it, screen time will be limited to 45 minutes per week.
It's not about 'passion against AI', it's a year waiting period. There isn't much evidence that AI improves student outcomes, and there's more cases showing harm, so the responsible approach is to wait for more information.
Also, they've banned phone use for quite a while now, which I think most people agree is correct in a learning env.
Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns.
I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote:
"It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses."
Im for this as I use AI in my current college classes to learn things quickly. Also, save money aka not have to buy/read the textbook.
Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class.
So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.
So you'd rather give money to the company that stole the copyrighted material of experts and academics instead of giving them money? Sure some textbooks are corporate greed schemes themselves, but many others are just the work of a group of professors
You're literally stealing from yourself by paying for tuition and not getting any benefit from it besides a piece of paper that won't hold to scrutiny once someone asks you to code something on an interview or in a company.
Intern quality at my FAANG has been dreadful for the past year, and new grads aren't much better. Most don't pass probation nowadays.
I figure this is quickly becoming an either use steroids for bodybuilding competitions even if you're against them or opt out of competing kind of situation.
There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”.
In 2004 I had a program on my TI-89 "Calculus Made Easy". It would do basically everything AND show your work.
Someone gave it to me about 2/3's of the way through Calc 1. I truly regret having become dependent on it. I studied enough to know roughly what I was doing but not enough to not be dependent.
I suspect learning with AI is the same sort of thing. You're learning, but you're not deep learning .
As a counterpoint, I am self-studying physics while relearning the calculus and math I took in undergrad.
AI has been immensely valuable, but I suspect only so because I am intrinsically motivated to learn this material. When I make errors in solving problems due to a confusion in understanding, it can help me work through the problem the same way a TA would, without having to wait and where I can ask a million clarifying questions until the idea is concrete in my mind.
Could I abuse it to just answer questions for me? Absolutely. But since that’s at odds with my actual goal, I don’t.
I use plenty of algebra and occasionally a bit of geometry estimating and managing construction projects, but I’ve never found it necessary to find an exact solution for an area under a curve or the rate of change of a function at a specific point.
I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or traprezoids and graph paper.
I burned 100s of hours into my 400 level classes, some of those hours were completely wasted on things that I could never figure out how to get them to work.
That’s one of the tragedies of AI to me. I fear that apart from everything else, it will make us collectively stupid and lazy.
I see this everywhere, with people seemingly losing the ability to use the tiniest amount of intellect or mental effort, if only AI can give something that vaguely looks like it might be the answer. Even if the output is great and AI is a great force for the better, and we will all share in its glorious outputs - we’ll degenerate into a lazy, stupid mass unable to reliably count our own fingers.
I laughed at the idea of Wall-E as a kid. At least the "humans give up all autonomy and wheel around in sci-fi carts served by an AI" (as a 10YO I was neutral to the environmentalist message).
Now, 20 years later, I see the underpinnings of this being formed in real time. I did not heed the warnings.
The wrong assumption is that you had any skills before that. But what you (and nearly all of us did) was using other sources to generate work. You looked up stuff online, asked a colleague who did this before and so on. Then simply fitted you heard into what you were doing. Now the source is one place and you are romanticizing former you.
It's also not banning parents from using AI with their kids or showing their kids AI outside of school so I don't know the issue. Does anyone here actually have kids in school and can report on what kind of "AI" these kids are using, because I can almost guarantee they would be using it as a glorified wikipedia at the absolute top end. They aren't going to be doing the kind of stuff people on here are using it for..
Saying that a human teacher is equivalent to an LLM is derogatory to the teachers and exaggerating the capabilities of the LLM. I say this as someone who uses these things daily in my work and personal life. Let's not murky the waters with complete falsehoods
LLMs have been better than many teachers I've had in my life. To no fault of the teachers, it's hard to compete with something that has understanding of every subject, is hooked up to the internet, and is given 1:1 time with the person learning at any time of the day, answering promptly.
LLMs have enormous capacity for supporting a person who is motivated to learn and wants individualized support and instruction. That doesn’t describe all students and there’s no reason why seat time in the classroom should be used that way - students can still use an LLM to help them learn if they’re motivated to do that, but not during class.
Sure, classroom sizes can be a detriment to those that require more hands on instruction time. But that's not everyone and not every school suffers from overcrowding.
LLMs are very good at convincing people they are learning, because they give answers quickly and fairly accurately. But that makes them bad teachers, not better teachers. The fact that LLMs are good problem solvers is to their detriment when it comes to teaching. We don't want to solve problems in this domain, we want to slowly trickle information and build practice so students can solve problems.
I think people conflate productivity for learning. LLMs can greatly help with productivity. But... so can hiring an employee. Well, what have you learned? Nothing, you outsourced 90% of it. You decidedly learned less than if you were less productive and did it yourself.
The LLM is clearly better. I'd rather go back and forth with an emotionless computer to find the truth than to beat my head against a brick wall trying to get some radical emotional-logic driven University activist professor (or one of their inculcated stooges) to stop lying to me.
Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator was already banned.
This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
Imagine if you had! You might be the 100X JavaScript writer.
More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly).
The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself.
>why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript?
because you chose computer science/SWE instead of Computer Engineering. At least, those were in fact the differences in my programs at my alma mater.
even then, introductory assembly was a 200 level course at my school. we did in fact learn how assembly code worked to help better prep us for advanced software courses where we manage memory and develop domain knowledge.
> In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities.
> Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education.
> Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented.
> Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Marilyn vos Savant had said that it is acceptable to use a calculator when learing arithmetic (I do not remember the reason given) but that clocks should not be used to learn time. (I might be mistaken, since I do not remember for sure.)
The point of the study is that they should be using calculators to answer their questions rather than spending an inordinate amount of time on manual calculations that don't further their education and cause them to lose interest in the subject.
> It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers
When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently.
The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations.
I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.
giving ai to children without limits is like giving them leg-braces or wheelchairs; they'll get used to it and never learn to walk or run by themselves much less karate... they'll be cripples from the start.
I agree with other posters that kids need to learn critical thinking skills at an early age. I hope we don't see Texas educators trying to take the opposite side of the coin and mandating AI teachers at all (or any) levels just to try to own some more libs in NYC. This state has enough problems.
But I assume students already aren't allowed to just submit genAI output and afaik most classes don't involve computer use, so what's really the change?
Because the "in schools" changes the calculus massively. You see a similar reaction to banning phones and personal computers while in school.
Kids can still access and use AI outside of school meaning the enforcement is entirely on the school and doesn't require massively a privacy invasion for adults by way of age verification. Schools already put children under (from an adult perspective at least) a pretty intense rules regime so this doesn't represent any kind of change—indeed it's probably better framed as a
lack of a change from the status quo.
The dirty secret on NYC schools is that the upper-middle class tends to send their kids to private schools unless they can get their kids into some gifted/talented public schools. The real experimentation on what tools will and will not work is happening there under the watchful eye of wealthy hyper-involved (see: comfy jobs w/ adequate spare time) parents.
I don't know what level of digital tools is best for which types of kids, but the public school system would be prudent in adopting the learnings from the private school system and making sure the best education isn't just available to the rich. The current mayor is mad-effective at his job but does have a habit of doing the ol' wink-wink nod-nod to keep his base happy. This (along with a pointless Waymo ban) sounds like one of those actions.
What if the learning from private schools is to have small class sizes, well paid teachers, and a situation where parents have time and resources to spend their kids? It’s hard to compare public versus private
There's a far deeper and longer standing issue here and that's rent-seeking.
We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:
1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and
2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.
You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.
So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.
> But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system
software development is like this too; you can do fine without all the fancy ceremonies and tools as long as you get the basics right, but rent-seeking and consultants run rampant to everyones detriment
If AI has a major impact on the job market as some believe, then it would be interesting to see a society where AI related profits are used to provide free education for everyone who wants it.
At some point they will begin running out of human created data for model training and schools with strict AI policies will be the best source of non AI data going forward.
Thats kind of a symbiotic relationship that makes sense for students and AI companies.
Once AI output begins replacing human output and the models begin training on it, there may be increasingly few places left for data that isnt likely to lead to a model collapse.
There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater. Math Academy is one. I hope for a Cambrian explosion of variations of this approach. Imagine a resourceful and infinitely patient tutor guiding you through the most difficult concepts of your education, deeply attentive to your signals about flaws in your mental model, and feeding you carefully crafted clarifying challenges with engineered timing.
AI feeding students the right answers is damaging, but feeding them the right questions at the right moment is the way forward.
> There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater.
It takes years to understand the effects of the changes we implement in our school systems and curriculums and this attitude of change it now and hope for the best later is what's gotten us to a point where high school students can't read at a high school level (and this problem was happening before LLMs).
Your hypothetical utopia of education should not be tested out on the masses.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadIf there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.
The ban goes through eighth grade, and in high school apparently there's a specific AI literacy class. It's unclear from the article if that's the only AI in high school or it's just unregulated.
My opinion: it's a good policy and frankly just common sense.
- Students using AI risk offloading their cognition onto the AI and thereby skipping the actual learning process.
- Teachers using AI likewise do a disservice to the students.
In the middle of all that, there may actually be a version of AI that can help people learn without incurring the major downsides, but I've not seen any evidence of that in the current AI systems, to the point that an outright ban in the school setting makes sense. I'm heartened to see more education organizations think similarly [1].
[1]: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/registrar/academic-ru...
If I had ChatGPT as a kid I would have learned nothing.
Higher homework scores, but _substantially_ worse test results.
About what you'd expect, right? Friction is important for learning. Make the process too smooth and it slides right off the brain.
i know many who sucked at high school testing and accomplished great feats on their own academically and otherwise
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
Still, not shocking that the DSA stronghold that elected someone like Mamdani is going to be passionate against AI.
Will be interesting to watch outcomes diverge over the next few years. If you’re gonna ban stuff, do it at local levels like this so we can see differences play out across many locations/districts.
Grew up in Greece and was shocked that calculators are used in high school math.
An interesting note: "And teachers will not be able to ask A.I. to grade assignments." This prevents teachers from using it as well, which is an interesting angle.
The question is "do you want to teach the tool and its use or do you want to teach thinking manually". The west is under the impression that if you don't teach the tool then people will be unemployable.
Even when they teach it, screen time will be limited to 45 minutes per week.
It's not about 'passion against AI', it's a year waiting period. There isn't much evidence that AI improves student outcomes, and there's more cases showing harm, so the responsible approach is to wait for more information.
Also, they've banned phone use for quite a while now, which I think most people agree is correct in a learning env.
skittish
"skiddish" isn't a word, the only thing I can think of is leaving a 'skid mark' in one's underwear...
I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote:
"It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses."
Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class.
So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.
Intern quality at my FAANG has been dreadful for the past year, and new grads aren't much better. Most don't pass probation nowadays.
I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”
Big regret.
Someone gave it to me about 2/3's of the way through Calc 1. I truly regret having become dependent on it. I studied enough to know roughly what I was doing but not enough to not be dependent.
I suspect learning with AI is the same sort of thing. You're learning, but you're not deep learning .
AI has been immensely valuable, but I suspect only so because I am intrinsically motivated to learn this material. When I make errors in solving problems due to a confusion in understanding, it can help me work through the problem the same way a TA would, without having to wait and where I can ask a million clarifying questions until the idea is concrete in my mind.
Could I abuse it to just answer questions for me? Absolutely. But since that’s at odds with my actual goal, I don’t.
I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or traprezoids and graph paper.
I burned 100s of hours into my 400 level classes, some of those hours were completely wasted on things that I could never figure out how to get them to work.
Until that will chance the any and all shortcuts will be used, because the goal of the kid is to:
* get grades high enough to keep parents happy * do fun stuff
The motivation to get knowledge for something other than your own hobbies/curiosity only comes when you need to start paying the bills and get a job
I never cheated, but it's far too high a bar to expect adolescents to be able to restrain themselves from a magic answer machine.
And the more they use it, the further they're going to fall behind in the basics (being able to do math, read, and write).
I see this everywhere, with people seemingly losing the ability to use the tiniest amount of intellect or mental effort, if only AI can give something that vaguely looks like it might be the answer. Even if the output is great and AI is a great force for the better, and we will all share in its glorious outputs - we’ll degenerate into a lazy, stupid mass unable to reliably count our own fingers.
And that’s a future to be afraid of.
Now, 20 years later, I see the underpinnings of this being formed in real time. I did not heed the warnings.
It’s terrible.
I think people conflate productivity for learning. LLMs can greatly help with productivity. But... so can hiring an employee. Well, what have you learned? Nothing, you outsourced 90% of it. You decidedly learned less than if you were less productive and did it yourself.
This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly).
The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself.
Pedagogy is a tricky thing.
because you chose computer science/SWE instead of Computer Engineering. At least, those were in fact the differences in my programs at my alma mater.
even then, introductory assembly was a 200 level course at my school. we did in fact learn how assembly code worked to help better prep us for advanced software courses where we manage memory and develop domain knowledge.
Yeah, a bad reason.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affec...
> In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities.
> Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education.
> Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented.
> Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.
When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently.
The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations.
I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.
giving ai to children without limits is like giving them leg-braces or wheelchairs; they'll get used to it and never learn to walk or run by themselves much less karate... they'll be cripples from the start.
https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...
Kids can still access and use AI outside of school meaning the enforcement is entirely on the school and doesn't require massively a privacy invasion for adults by way of age verification. Schools already put children under (from an adult perspective at least) a pretty intense rules regime so this doesn't represent any kind of change—indeed it's probably better framed as a lack of a change from the status quo.
I don't know what level of digital tools is best for which types of kids, but the public school system would be prudent in adopting the learnings from the private school system and making sure the best education isn't just available to the rich. The current mayor is mad-effective at his job but does have a habit of doing the ol' wink-wink nod-nod to keep his base happy. This (along with a pointless Waymo ban) sounds like one of those actions.
We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:
1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and
2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.
You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.
So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.
At some point they will begin running out of human created data for model training and schools with strict AI policies will be the best source of non AI data going forward.
Thats kind of a symbiotic relationship that makes sense for students and AI companies.
Once AI output begins replacing human output and the models begin training on it, there may be increasingly few places left for data that isnt likely to lead to a model collapse.
AI feeding students the right answers is damaging, but feeding them the right questions at the right moment is the way forward.
It takes years to understand the effects of the changes we implement in our school systems and curriculums and this attitude of change it now and hope for the best later is what's gotten us to a point where high school students can't read at a high school level (and this problem was happening before LLMs).
Your hypothetical utopia of education should not be tested out on the masses.