> The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite.
Before even getting to any of the other issues people may have with generative AI, in my opinion by far the most important question is simply does the AI help students learn better? And it's pretty clear to me that the answer is "no."
To be frank, this one quote from a Google executive pretty much lays bare the whole scam:
> [Sinha of Google for Education] added that, by using A.I. tools, students are “able to create much more impressive projects that you could have never done before.”
This is one of the most obvious lies that the slop shops are trying to peddle. Using generative AI to make something is analogous to, and often literally just, hiring a third party to make the thing for you. It is not analogous to creating the thing yourself. I think the vast majority of people can recognize this, but unsurprisingly some people are buying the snake oil.
This really goes to the heart of what education is, doesn't it? While I'm no expert on theories of learning, I can draw from my own experiences, which I think are not exceptional. In my experience we learn things by (1) passively acquiring information, (2) thinking about the thing on our own, and (3) actively doing something with the knowledge. My point is that (2) and (3) are just as important as (1), and removing or reducing those is actively hampering learning rather than helping. As the article correctly points out, "creating impressive projects" has absolutely nothing to do with education. Duh.
My real worry is that teachers, who are already underpaid and underappreciated, will feel a lot of pressure to adopt some of these tools purely to manage their own workloads, and I think that would be a sad and preventable outcome.
> The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite.
https://archive.ph/2026.04.23-101509/https://www.newyorker.c...
Before even getting to any of the other issues people may have with generative AI, in my opinion by far the most important question is simply does the AI help students learn better? And it's pretty clear to me that the answer is "no."
To be frank, this one quote from a Google executive pretty much lays bare the whole scam:
> [Sinha of Google for Education] added that, by using A.I. tools, students are “able to create much more impressive projects that you could have never done before.”
This is one of the most obvious lies that the slop shops are trying to peddle. Using generative AI to make something is analogous to, and often literally just, hiring a third party to make the thing for you. It is not analogous to creating the thing yourself. I think the vast majority of people can recognize this, but unsurprisingly some people are buying the snake oil.
This really goes to the heart of what education is, doesn't it? While I'm no expert on theories of learning, I can draw from my own experiences, which I think are not exceptional. In my experience we learn things by (1) passively acquiring information, (2) thinking about the thing on our own, and (3) actively doing something with the knowledge. My point is that (2) and (3) are just as important as (1), and removing or reducing those is actively hampering learning rather than helping. As the article correctly points out, "creating impressive projects" has absolutely nothing to do with education. Duh.
My real worry is that teachers, who are already underpaid and underappreciated, will feel a lot of pressure to adopt some of these tools purely to manage their own workloads, and I think that would be a sad and preventable outcome.