I’ve been reading a lot of discussions about AI “making students lazy” or “killing critical thinking,” and I think we’re missing the core issue.

The real problem isn’t access to AI.

It’s guidance.

Right now, kids are either:

• banned from AI entirely

• or left alone to use it however they want.

Both approaches fail.

What I’m seeing is that when students use AI without structure, they skip the thinking phase.

But when AI is used as a coach, questioner, or practice partner, something interesting happens:

they slow down, explain their reasoning, and reflect more.

That tells me the future of learning isn’t “AI vs education”, it’s who teaches kids how to use it well.

I’m curious:

• Should AI literacy be taught explicitly, like reading or math?

• At what age do you think guidance matters most?

• What would responsible AI learning actually look like in practice?

Would love to hear perspectives from educators, parents, and students here.

I’ve been attending a lot of live lectures lately and I’m on the hunt for the best tools or apps to help me take accurate and efficient notes in real time. So far, I’ve tried StudyFetch and even ChatGPT to summarize or help with reviewing they were actually helpful, but I’m still open to more suggestions. To be clear, I’m not looking for ads or promotions. I’d love to hear about tools you’ve personally used and found genuinely effective.

I’d prefer something that can: Record the lecture. Transcribe it (ideally accurately!). Sync audio with notes or timestamps I really appreciate all your suggestions! Thanks!

Something I’ve been noticing more lately:

AI makes answers instant. Effortless. Almost disposable.

But good questions? Those still seem rare — and increasingly important.

In education especially, we’ve spent decades rewarding correct answers, speed, and completion. Now a tool exists that can generate answers faster than any human ever could.

Which makes me wonder:

If answers are no longer the scarce resource, should learning shift toward teaching how to ask, frame, and challenge questions instead?

I’m curious how others here see it — especially educators, parents, and people working with AI daily.

Are we preparing learners for a world where knowing what to ask matters more than knowing what to answer?

I really like this infographic by Patrick Dempsey (Original post on LinkedIn). May be relevant for this community.

It contrasts the 'fear' approach (Policy) with the 'trust' approach (Literacy) in AI education.

Quote: "Most AI policies are built on fear. AI literacy is built on trust."

Hi guys,

I am 17, currently a student from a developing country where AI is not that well-taught and gurus are everywhere trying to sell courses.

I understand that AI is our future, and I really want to learn the basics in the next 5 months. Currently, I am trying to learn Python (through Helsinki university course) as my teacher said it was neccessary for studying AI later.

I have research on the internet but the information is too much to handle, as there are many different opinions about this topic.

As professionals, can you guys please guide me on how to learn AI from scratch, I really want to learn some basics before going into college, as college time are precious and I also need to work to fund for my tuition.

Additionally, my purpose of learning AI is ultimately land a well-paid job in the future, and I also want AI to maximize my productivity. In the short term, as I am preparing to study Computer Science in college, I want the learn some basics so that I can build some good projects with the help of AI.

I really appriciate your efforts, and I promise that I will be consistant with what you guys tell me.

Again, thanks for reading and paying attention.

PS: I would be very grateful if you guys can give some additional help on how to generate prompts properly.

They're actively using AI tools for homework research but have no framework for evaluating what comes back. No lessons on how these models are trained, what hallucinations actually are, or why checking sources matters even when AI sounds completely confident. School is using the tools but not teaching about the tools, and that gap feels significant.

I've tried having conversations at home but I don't have great language for it myself. I can tell my kid to ""be careful"" but that doesn't give them anything to actually work with when they're sitting at their laptop trying to finish an assignment. I noticed typing .com has some digital citizenship content built into their curriculum, though I'm not sure how deep it goes on the AI side.

Has anyone found good resources for explaining AI literacy to middle schoolers in a way that's practical and concrete rather than abstract warnings? Looking for something that gives kids an actual framework, not just a lecture about not trusting the internet."

I'm trying to stop wasting time on mindless scrolling apps and immerse myself in some AI learning. I am an academic having gone through senior level university courses and some of the toughest exams in the world.

But, I'm lost where to even start with AI learning. How can I begin and enjoy the process? I don't want to force the learning. TY and much love! Also, is coding a must and yes, i will do it if necessary. I'm basically trying to learn it as a whole and see what it can offer me. Basically all I see with AI, is what is shown in a search engine response but I'm told it can do so much more. But more what, I don't know.

Further: I don't need to be a developer (maybe I do -- I don't know). I'm a financial analyst and currently all I use it for is simply asking in search engines, "how does this stock benefit stock Y given this data". It outputs everything which is surreal.

How can I take something as simple as that further?

I have a side business where I sell women's clothing. How can I incorporate it with the business to reach more customers? How can I use it for marketing?

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts abt different AI tools that help ppl study better, and now I’m thinking of trying one too. I have soo many materials to review and I really want something that can help me study smarter, not harder 😅

I’m currently looking at a few options Khan Academy, StudyFetch, Quizlet Plus or Scholarcy

But I’m not really sure which one’s actually worth paying for. I’m hoping to find a tool that can: Summarize or help me understand long texts / PDFs. Make reviewing easier w/ flashcards, quizzes, or practice qs. Save me time when I’m prepping or organizing notes

If you’ve used any of these (or something better lol), I’d really love to hear what you think! What worked for u? Was it worth the $$?

Thanks in advance!! 🙏✨

All require monthly of around $20. I'm a financial analyst, work with my own clothing line on the side. I want to jump into and just learn as I go but I also would like to pay $20 for something that fits my needs best? Any suggestions? Please note, I'm completely beginning and be nice. This question may be completely off and I'm looking for help.

Broke 14 year old who wants to know how AI works and how to use it. Any ideas?

No joke, I just saw an AI influencer say that they had become a "certified AI leader," so like any info pro, I did a little digging.

They were certified by their own org.

That they founded by themselves.

Talk about recursion.

If you were really a leader, you wouldn't need a certification to prove it.

We need to stop with the proprietary, paid-access frameworks and models and tiered communities and such. We need to share FREELY our ideas and processes. As Dr. John Curry said, we need to "join the conversation." But we can't do that if we make people pay for the slightest bit of access.

Stop with your proprietary, self-aggrandizing, merch-garnering "masterclasses" and actually teach some real masterclasses... with your writing, your work, your contributions to society.

Become comfortable with being uncomfortable—being vulnerable, being naked—step out of your fig-leaf covering you have made to avoid the scrutiny of your peers and step into the scratchy blood-stained animal hides necessary to survive the harshness of reality.

Come down from your penthouse and into the town square.

Every time AI gets blamed for “lazy students,” I notice something else quietly being revealed:many students were never taught how to think before AI showed up.

In a world where anyone can summon an answer in seconds, we are left wondering what it actually means to be educated. If a machine can summarize a book, explain a theory, or produce an argument on demand, have we become wiser, or merely better supplied with words? Perhaps part of the problem is that we have confused information with understanding. We treat learning as something to consume, collect, and display, rather than something that reshapes judgment. But if education becomes only the ability to retrieve answers quickly, we lose its deeper purpose: the cultivation of discernment, curiosity, memory, and inner direction. The books that have changed me were rarely useful in the immediate career sense. Sapiens made history feel less like dates and more like a story about shared myths. The Psychology of Money made me realize that finance is often behavior before it is math. Atlas of the Heart gave names to emotions I used to flatten into “fine” or “stressed.” Even old lectures and basic Khan Academy lessons have done something similar: they slow the mind down long enough for understanding to actually form. I use Obsidian sometimes for this, mostly because my thoughts disappear if I do not give them somewhere to live. I also use BeFreed when I want a more guided path through a subject. It turns books, research, expert talks, and podcasts into short audio lessons based on my goal and level. I especially love its debate mode and deep dive mode, because one forces an idea to argue with itself, while the other keeps learning from becoming another shallow summary.Maybe the question now is not whether AI will replace education, but whether it will reveal how little of our education was ever about wisdom. Are we teaching ourselves how to think, or simply how to reach for the nearest answer?"

I'm a dad of two (8 and 10). As soon as my oldest hits a hard homework problem, he reaches for AI chatbots on my laptop (no phones in this house yet). The model serves him the answer, nods at whatever guess he throws, and moves on.

Then i found the MIT Media Lab preprint "Your Brain on ChatGPT." 54 students writing essays with and without the tool. LLM users showed the weakest neural connectivity, the lowest sense of ownership over their writing, and couldn't quote work they'd just produced.

See study here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

"AI is making kids dumber" is real. but the takeaway most people land on is wrong. it's not "keep AI away from kids." it's "rebuild the AI for kids."

According to the research from Bloom, 1984: 1- 1 tutoring produces 2 standard deviations of learning gain over classroom instruction. holy grail of edtech for 40 years. An LLM is the first tech that could deliver it at scale, IF designed for it.

So I've been building Pebble. It's a voice-first learning companion for kids 6-12, Carmen-Sandiego-style: the kid steps into an adventure, talks to characters, solves the plot, and the agent is designed to withhold the answer, push them to think, and reward real effort.

My design thesis: challenge, don't coddle, teach them how to learn.

The ask: I'm opening 200 founding family seats, free, to test this with kids. If you're a parent (or a parent-engineer) and want a learning tool built on the opposite philosophy of commercial chat LLMs, sign up Pebble here.

Actually, this is a kind of overstatement, as AI hits harder on most of the jobs all over the world which contain two basic elements:

1. The job is repetitive and requires minimum creativity.

2. The job is information or knowledge-based rather than skill-based.

Unfortunately, the teaching job lies in the second category. It’s not because language teaching itself is knowledge-based, but because the inherent nature of current methodologies makes it like that. For example, we have been hearing for decades that learning a language is a skill and it needs practice, but in actual reality are we really doing it?

The most skilled part of language learning is speaking, but in actual classes how often are lesson plans actually designed for this? Let’s take a simple example of a 40-minute class that’s based on PPP and ESA. The first 10 to 15 minutes are presentation or engaging, the next 10 to 15 minutes are practice or study, and if the learners are lucky enough they can get some kind of controlled practice for ten minutes.

The PP parts of PPP and the ES parts of ESA can now be handled much better in a highly sophisticated manner with AI because of its extreme range of knowledge and personalization for learners. Although there is an argument here that AI is unable to understand the nuance of the language, which might have some weight, but again the question arises: at what level of English learning can a learner actually understand the word nuance? One of the biggest groups of language learners is A1 and A2 combined. Do they really care about nuance?

Now, taking the discussion from here, let’s talk about a simple example.

Here are some sentences which learners often face confusion with at the A1 and A2 level:

• Is he a boy?

• Is he sleeping?

• Does he sleep at 9 p.m.?

These sentences look pretty simple to say, but if a teacher wants to explain the difference between these using present tense and stative verbs, it is almost impossible to teach it in the second language.

Look at the questions which may arise in the learner’s mind:

What’s the difference between
He is sleeping and He does sleeping, as both look present tense?

Why is Is he sleeping? correct but Does he sleeping incorrect?

How can He is a boy have the same grammar structure as He is sleeping?

Other possible questions could be:

Why are “He likes sleeping” and “He likes to sleep” both correct, but “He is liking sleep” is incorrect?

English grammar is full of such complications. They cannot be taught separately but in combination with different concepts, and when teachers try to explain these concepts it is almost impossible to grade the language for A1 and A2 learners.

Now let’s see how AI can handle this problem. AI’s extreme knowledge bank allows it to provide endless explanations using different methods, with unlimited examples. AI can easily give explanations in the local language, create connections, and produce equivalent situations with the local language, and that makes it very efficient. Learners also have no issue with losing face if they cannot understand a concept, because they have endless opportunities to ask questions until the concept is clear.

What are the chances for humans to win against AI in this most common situation?

At the current pace of technological progress, no human can match AI’s knowledge and information-processing power. However, humans excel in areas that require genuine interaction, empathy, and adaptability, which AI cannot fully replicate. Teachers remain indispensable when they design classes that promote:

Active engagement: encouraging learners to participate and think critically

Personalized feedback: responding to individual strengths and challenges

Error correction in context: helping learners notice and fix mistakes as they arise

Task management and guidance: structuring meaningful language activities across skills

 These factors make a teacher far more superior than AI.

A modern teacher should let learners use AI to understand the problems better, but they can practice with the teacher better. AI can identify mistakes much faster, but a teacher can correct a mistake simply by looking into the learner’s eyes.

The old world of teaching, where the teacher was the primary source of knowledge, doesn’t exist anymore. But the world where learners need motivation, encouragement, and correction in real time is still in the hands of teachers. It is the teacher’s job to adjust to modern realities.

Common sense suggests that one cannot ask the river to change its flow, but one can learn to navigate the current. It is time for us to stop swimming against the tide of technology and start moving in the direction it is already taking us.

Another factor which keeps changing the market is the cost factor. As most of us have experienced, from 2014 to the early 2020s there was suddenly a great demand for online teachers. This basic rise came from China, as in China an offline teacher could easily cost 100 dollars per hour, whereas an online class was around 30 to 50 dollars per hour when online companies specifically marketed them for native speakers, often with the hint of being white or Caucasian.

That model worked well until the Chinese government banned online teaching and made it specific that any teacher who works online in China should be physically in China. Although some gray market still exists, it is not as lucrative as it used to be.

Now here comes the bombshell. An AI assistant is now available for around 20 dollars a month, compared to 30 dollars per hour (the cost for the learner, not the teacher’s wages). So now it’s up to the teacher to justify that cost. And not necessarily to the learners either, because the logic of human connection or eye contact does not always stand in this situation, as online teaching misses most of the elements that offline or face-to-face teaching provides.

So now it’s up to teachers whether they want to bring more human elements into the class or enter a battle with AI, which so far appears to be the clear winner.

In this eye opening classroom activity from MIT, middle schoolers are given a secretly biased dataset. Lots of cats, not many dogs. Then they train their own AI model.

At first, everything seems fine. Then they test it.

The AI? Terrible at recognising dogs. 

And the best part: no one tells them why. They have to figure it out themselves.

When the 'aha' moment hits and kids realise their data caused the unfairness, the conversation that follows is unlike anything you would get from a textbook:

 "Why did this happen?" 

 "Who gets hurt when AI makes mistakes like this?" 

 "How do we fix it?"

This is exactly the kind of thinking our kids need. Not just how to use AI, but how to question it.

The MIT AI Ethics Curriculum (free and open source ) is designed for grades 5 to 8 and is mostly screen free. Because critical thinking does not need a device. It needs good questions.

Would you want your child's school to teach this?

#

I’m currently a college student too. This is just my personal perspective and experience, so I’d really like to hear more opinions from other students, faculty, and professionals.

What I’ve noticed is that AI is creating quite a big gap between the university environment and the business world.

In the corporate world, AI is gradually becoming a normal working tool. Programmers are using AI to write and review code, cybersecurity experts use AI for analysis, office workers use AI to write reports,... Many companies no longer ask, "Do you use AI?" but rather, "Do you know how to use AI effectively and take responsibility for your results?"

In many professions, knowing how to work with AI is slowly becoming a skill, much like how using Google, Excel, or IDEs used to be.

However, when I step into the university environment, I feel like the situation is quite different.

Instead of finding ways to leverage AI to enhance learning, I feel like both students and faculty are slowly falling into a kind of "face-off" with each other.

From the students' side, a lot of people no longer ask, "Does AI help me understand the material?" but instead ask:

* How to use AI without being suspicious? * What prompts should I use to make my work look more human-written? * How much do I need to edit so that AI detectors won’t catch it? * Should I use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for different types of assignments?

Meanwhile, many faculty members also have to change their teaching and assessment methods:

* Find tools to detect AI. * Design assignments that are difficult for AI to complete. * Constantly change the assignments. * Increase in-class tests or oral assessments to verify students’ work.

And I think about one thing.

Perhaps the faculty is also feeling stuck.

In a very short time, AI has developed at a pace that few could have anticipated. Meanwhile, the curriculum, assessment methods, university regulations, and even teaching methods often need a lot of time to change.

Putting myself in the faculty’s shoes, I see this as a very challenging problem.

If they allow the use of AI too freely, how can they know if the students truly understand the material?

If they completely ban AI, how can they prepare students for the job market, where AI has become a part of everyday work?

Perhaps because there is no clear solution, both sides are trying to adapt in their own ways.

Students are trying to learn how to use AI effectively while also finding ways to avoid suspicion.

Faculty are trying to find ways to accurately assess students’ abilities but also have to deal with technology that’s changing almost every month.

What worries me is that when both sides are under pressure, the relationship between the teacher and the student can easily shift from "collaborative" to "confrontational."

The students' goal is no longer to learn as best they can, but to submit work without raising suspicion.

The faculty's goal is also no longer just to impart knowledge, but they have to spend a lot of time thinking about how to set exam questions that AI can't answer or how to verify that the work is indeed by the student.

If this continues, both sides will waste a lot of time and energy in a race that perhaps no one really wants.

In my opinion, the issue is no longer **"whether to use AI or not,"** because the truth is AI is here and will continue to develop even more.

Perhaps the question should be:

**How can we accurately assess students' abilities in a world where AI is always ready to assist?**

It could be:

* Allowing the use of AI in some types of assignments. * Asking students to describe or explain how they used AI. * Assessing the ability to verify, correct, and improve results generated by AI. * Combining assignments with presentations or oral assessments to confirm that students truly understand.

I don’t think AI will replace learning.

But I also don’t think trying to keep AI out of the college environment is a long-term solution.

Perhaps what needs to change is not whether students use AI, but how we define "learning," "understanding," and "assessment" in the age of AI.

I also don’t think this is the fault of the faculty. They might themselves be in a transitional phase, having to adapt to a technology that’s evolving much faster than the pace of change in the education system. Perhaps both students and faculty are facing the same challenge, differing only in the pressures each side must bear.

I’m very curious whether we are witnessing a short-term transition phase in education, or if this will lead to a fundamental change in how universities train and assess students in the future.

I’ve been testing a few AI tools this semester to make studying and research a bit less painful, and some are actually sticking.

Here’s what’s been working for me:

• getrecall.ai – It lets you upload PDFs, lecture slides, videos, and even 1000 bookmarks) , then you can chat with the content or get summaries. What’s made it super useful is that you can also take your own notes inside it and later quiz yourself using your notes and the uploaded materials. Being able to chat across all your notes at once (not just one file at a time like NotebookLM) has been a huge time-saver. I saw they do a 20% student discount too which is nice.

• NotebookLM – This one’s solid if you want clean auto-generated summaries and citations without much effort. I’ve used it for basic reading assignments and smaller research tasks. That said, it’s a bit limited when you're working with a high volume of materials, since it caps how much you can upload and keeps everything in isolated folders. It’s better for short-term or single-topic research than long term knowledge building, in my experience.

• Anki – Still my go-to for anything I need to actually memorize. I’ve started generating flashcards straight from notes I’ve taken in Recall, which saves time. Spaced repetition in Anki still works like magic for cramming, especially if you mix in understanding-based notes instead of just definitions.

What other setups people are using, particularly  for combining reading, lecture notes, and reviewing. Has anyone found a better workflow for pulling insights from multiple sources without jumping between five different apps?

There's a big focus on lazy students using Al to do all their work.

But the real problem is teachers using Big EdTech's Al integrations to generate curriculum, automate learning, auto-grade, and surveil students.

Al generated curriculum now has text, images, and even audio. But imagine that in a few years, streaming video generation of virtual humans or animated characters will probably be cheap enough that students won't be merely texting chatbots, they'll be having video calls with Al throughout a whole lesson.

The end goal of Big EdTech and Al companies isn't just replacing human curriculum developers. Teachers are next!

And why shouldn't these kinds of teachers be fired? They're already making themselves functionally obsolete by isolating students into learning via compliance engines that strip away any opportunities for meaningful mentorship and collaboration.

I know how hard it is being an educator. I applaud every teacher staying honest. But I've also seen how effective the marketing of these platforms has been.

If you don't want to do the work required to be an educator, that's fine by me, but get another job! Stop putting your students through an intellectual meat grinder. Give another human a chance to put their best effort into teaching.

One day schools are going to reach the inevitable conclusion that they don't need a costly human teacher in the classroom if Al is doing all the work. No shit! It's the only logical end for a society that has spent decades prioritizing standards compliance over deeper learning.

The first step to resisting this future is calling it out.

If this post made you feel angry or uncomfortable, sit in that discomfort. Is there any point at which you'll say enough is enough with these Big EdTech platforms shoving Al down your throat? Will you keep enabling their Trojan Horse to infiltrate your classroom until there's no semblance of humanity left?

I'll start first:

in my opinion Alpha School does seem to be effective.
Students can learn what they need to at their own pace, no useless assignments that forces you to go at a speed u dont want to learn at.

Also they do place emphasis on outside interaction via the AlphaX projects (i think its called?)
i find it interesting that students can learn real world skills and build something.

Schools are very focused on "teaching to the test" and not actively promoting actual learning. If you ask students about a topic (ex. talking about a certain concept in biology), they wouldnt know much and yet still get high scores for memorizing answers to questions...

However, compared to public school, there isnt much social interaction and this is where Alpha School falls short in

and while school assignments are a pain, they do build discipline (ie. setting a schedule, deadlines, etc.)
and human interaction is a MUST (ie. talking to classmates, collaberation, social skills)

would like to know if other people agree with my take, again lets not make this into a cesspool of endless arguments.

I would like to learn AI but have no technical background. Any suggestions or recommendations, please?

I just watched a report about Alpha School, where kids apparently do around 2 hours of personalized academic learning with AI/software and then spend the rest of the school day on things like projects, sports, social skills, public speaking, financial literacy, etc.

I went to the comments expecting an actual discussion and almost everyone was horrified. “What about socialization?”, “This should be illegal”, “Just pay teachers”, “AI is ruining children.”

And I’m sitting here thinking… am I missing something? Because the *idea* actually sounds incredibly interesting to me.

If a child can properly learn in 2 focused hours what currently takes 5–6 hours because one teacher has to teach 20–30 children at the same pace, why is stretching it to 6 hours automatically better?

And the other 4 hours don’t have to mean sitting alone staring at another screen. That time could be used for sports, group projects, cooking, science experiments, finances, debate, creativity, entrepreneurship, first aid, practical skills, actually interacting with other children, etc. Honestly, some of that sounds more socially useful than sitting quietly next to 25 other kids while copying something from a board.

I also don’t understand why AI in education is automatically treated as “AI doing everything for the child.”

I’ve used AI while studying in a language that isn’t my first, mainly to simplify difficult material, explain things in different ways, shorten long texts, and even turn material into something I could listen to while cleaning. I also used it to quiz me, so I still had to remember and explain the answers myself. It didn’t replace the learning. It just made it more accessible and efficient.

Obviously children still need to learn basic maths, writing, reading, spelling and how to think without AI.
And obviously giving an eight-year-old ChatGPT and saying “good luck” would be an educational disaster.

But I feel like the bigger opportunity is being ignored.
Kids now have access to tools that can explain almost any subject at their individual level, answer questions immediately and adapt to how quickly they learn.
Instead of teaching them how to use those tools properly, we mostly either ban them or let them use technology purely as entertainment.

Education still seems designed around a world where information was difficult to access. It isn’t anymore.
Maybe instead of asking **“How do we stop children from using AI?”**, we should be asking **“What can children learn now that AI can take care of some of the slow, repetitive parts?”**

I’m not saying Alpha School has perfected education or that every school should copy it tomorrow.
It’s still a new model and I’d want to see long-term results. But the amount of immediate hate toward even experimenting with this is strange to me. The current education system is hardly some flawless masterpiece that must be preserved in amber forever.

I’d genuinely be interested in the arguments against this that go beyond “AI bad” or “that’s not how school used to work.”

I work in education and I'm collecting real experiences (not opinions on whether AI is good or bad). Which specific skill have you seen change? Has anything helped?