Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools

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."

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.

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.

Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.

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.

Good. The more I use AI the more I feel like it will drag humanity into a local maxima that we'll never be able to escape from.

Makes sense. I had to learn how to add / subtract before I could use a calculator. Note: This policy doesn't seem to apply to high school

I can see the 2040 study already: “Schoolchildren who did not use AI in primary school show higher outcomes”

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.

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.

I remember a scene in Star Trek, where an AI is used to help teach the little Vulcan kids.

Forget AI, silicon valley parents don't want their kids using phones and computers either.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...

It's interesting to see the difference (so far) in comments about banning AI versus banning social media.

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.

*moves back to NYC*

Good. We need this everywhere.

Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.

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?

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.

Yep, just like the tech elite. Peter Thiel limits his kids to 90 min/week screentime.

Here's another (non-paywalled) source for this news: https://abcnews.com/Technology/new-york-city-public-schools-...

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...

Title: New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools

non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...

This makes about as much sense to me as banning all personal computers in the eighties from schools. You are putting these kids at a decided disadvantage.