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Discussion (67 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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."
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 .
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.
This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
There's good teachers and bad teachers, there's good AI implementations and bad ones. This bans all of them.
I'm not particularly worried, meaningful experimentation will continue in private schools. I just hope public schools can learn from that and open it back up when it's mature.
Not having the skills to assess the accuracy / validity of the information you accessed at breakneck speed however is going to be the downfall of us all.
Ai just made it easier to generate misinformation faster. We were already suffering from the blight of misinformation spreading through various media channels.
If AI can be used to better teach effective media and information literacy, we should be rolling that out in schools.
But it sounds like AI in public schools is largely just being used for speed running homework.
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 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.
So on the off-chance one of these tools (that even used AI in the background) could create a tool that actually worked well for, say, gifted public schools kids that don't need as much one-on-one attention, they could free up limited human teacher hours to give weaker kids more attention, that is no longer a possibility.
That possibility, only remains for private school kids, who don't even need it in the first place.
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.
Maybe if there are education-tailored AI models strictly limited to explaining and never giving the answer, but even then, how will you know when it's wrong?
It’s just refusing to think.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
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...
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...
This AI zealotry on here is getting unhinged. Young kids need to learn to think, comprehend and reason without some AI doing it for them. You depress me with your backward takes.
Not saying that we should replace ones with the other ones, but I’d say from age 11-12 and up kids should be taught how to use AI well.